Segments · High distance or age-25+ share
Your students are not in the cohort the benchmarks describe.
Federal retention reporting follows first-time, full-time students. If most of your enrollment is part-time, adult, or exclusively at a distance, you are being measured with an instrument built for someone else. This page covers what to measure instead, and how a National Society of Leadership and Success (NSLS) chapter builds belonging without a campus.
The retention median is IPEDS EF2023D, fall 2022 cohort returning fall 2023, federal data attributed to IPEDS. Delivery formats and completion time are published by the NSLS.
That 71.0% figure is the number your leadership will be shown, and it is worth understanding precisely what it counts. It follows a first-time, full-time, degree-seeking cohort into the following fall. A 34-year-old with prior credits, taking two courses while working full-time, is largely invisible to it.
So the comparison to make is not against a sector median. It is against institutions with a similar share of students enrolled exclusively at a distance and a similar share aged 25 or older, both of which IPEDS reports per institution, and both of which tell a reader far more about who you serve than control and level do.
What actually binds
Six constraints when there is no campus
The mechanism
Small groups substitute for proximity; messages do not
Attachment is the retention variable co-curricular programming actually moves, and distance does not remove it. It removes the accidental version of it. On a residential campus a student becomes known by walking past the same people. Online, nothing happens by accident.
The instinct is to increase communication: more outreach, more check-ins, more announcements. That produces volume, not attachment. What works is a small group with a shared goal, a real schedule, and the expectation that someone notices an absence.
That is what the NSLS Success Networking Teams are: small peer groups that set goals and hold each other accountable, three meetings across the journey. Around them sits a structure short enough for a working adult to finish: orientation, a two-hour Leadership Training Day, three Speaker Broadcasts, three Success Networking Team meetings, and induction, which usually takes place in a ceremony, roughly ten hours in total, typically one semester. Members who continue into Advanced and Executive coursework have up to three semesters to complete it.
Because the program runs fully asynchronously, none of that requires a student to be in a particular place at a particular hour. That is not a convenience feature for this population; it is the difference between a program they can join and one they cannot.
For institutions without a chapter of their own, the NSLS operates a National Online Chapter alongside its 800+ campus chapters.
Proof in this segment
There is no published outcome for this population, and we will not borrow one
The institutional retention outcomes the NSLS publishes come from campus-based programs. None of them is broken out by enrollment intensity, age, or distance status, which means none of them supports a claim about adult or online learners.
The closest evidence available sits at open-access institutions with heavily working, commuting student bodies: Delgado Community College and St. Petersburg College. Those are adjacent populations, not the same population, and students chose to join at both, so selection effects are part of each result. Read them as directionally relevant rather than as evidence about distance learners.
One published advisor observation is worth noting for what it does and does not claim. Debbie Fowler, SVP of Academic Delivery at Western Governors University, speaks on the NSLS program overview about sponsoring the program at a large, fully online institution. That shows the program runs at scale in a fully online setting.
Measuring it
Report the measure that fits your students
If your leadership benchmarks you on fall-to-fall retention, the first useful contribution is explaining what that number does and does not include for your population. The second is bringing a better one.
Term-to-term continuation, course completion rate, and credits earned per term all describe an adult learner more accurately, and all move faster than an annual measure. Disaggregate by enrollment intensity and by exclusively-distance status, and report the age-25+ and exclusively-distance shares alongside them so a reader knows who you are describing.
Then apply the same discipline any co-curricular claim needs: define participation before the term begins, compare against a matched group rather than your institution-wide rate, and report reach as a result in its own right. "We engaged 120 fully online students in structured peer groups" needs no causal claim to be worth funding. The full method is in our measuring student outcomes guide.
Talk through your campus goals
Explore the program, responsibilities, and next steps with our partnerships team.
Online and adult learner questions
Why do federal retention rates not describe online and adult learners well?
Because the standard IPEDS retention measure follows a first-time, full-time degree-seeking cohort returning the following fall. Adult learners often enroll part-time, have prior credits, start in a term other than fall, and stop out and return. Most of them are therefore outside the cohort the number describes. The sector medians, 77.0% at private nonprofit four-year institutions, 75.0% at public four-year, 63.0% at public two-year, and 71.0% across all degree-granting institutions (IPEDS EF2023D, fall 2022 cohort returning fall 2023), remain useful as sector context, but they are not a benchmark for a distance-heavy or adult-serving program.
What should an online program measure instead of fall-to-fall retention?
Term-to-term continuation, course completion, and credit accumulation per term, all disaggregated by enrollment intensity. Persistence, meaning continuing in higher education anywhere, is often more honest than retention for a population that transfers frequently. Two IPEDS variables are worth reporting alongside any of these so your peers know who you are describing: the share of students enrolled exclusively at a distance, and the share aged 25 or older.
How do you build belonging for students who never come to campus?
By creating small groups with a shared goal, a defined schedule, and mutual accountability, rather than by increasing communication volume. The NSLS Success Networking Teams work this way: small peer groups that set goals and hold each other accountable across three meetings. That structure is what makes a distance student known to specific people rather than to a dashboard.
Can the NSLS program run fully online?
Yes. The NSLS states that the program is available in person, virtually, and fully asynchronously. The full journey is five steps, orientation, a two-hour Leadership Training Day, three Speaker Broadcasts, three Success Networking Team meetings, and induction, which usually takes place in a ceremony, and takes around ten hours in total, and members typically complete it in one semester. Learners have up to three semesters to complete coursework.
Is there an option for institutions without their own chapter?
Yes. Alongside more than 800 chapters across the US, the NSLS operates a National Online Chapter that serves students at institutions that do not have a chapter of their own.
Are there published NSLS retention outcomes for an online or adult-serving program?
Not that we can source. The institutional retention outcomes the NSLS publishes come from campus-based programs at community colleges and four-year institutions, and none of them is broken out by enrollment intensity, age, or distance status. Anyone extending those figures to an adult or online population is inferring beyond what is published, and this page does not do that.
Sources. Retention medians, the first-time full-time cohort definition, and the per-institution exclusively-distance and age-25+ variables: IPEDS, retention from EF2023D, fall 2022 cohort returning fall 2023. Federal data, attributed to IPEDS and never to the NSLS. Delivery formats, including fully asynchronous, and the Debbie Fowler remarks: info.nsls.org/our-program. The five-step member journey, the ten-hour estimate, the 800+ chapters, and the National Online Chapter: nsls.org/faq. The three-semester window for coursework: nsls.org/leadership-education-programs. No published NSLS outcome is broken out by enrollment intensity, age, or distance status; this page states that rather than inferring one.