Benchmarking Students’ Tracking Rates in Undergraduate Higher Education with Different Time Windows: Retention Rates, Progression (Persistence) Rates, and Graduation (Completion) Rates

Students’ retention rates (RR), progression or persistence or progress rates (PR), graduation or completion rates (GR or CR), and attrition or dropout rates (AR or DR) are statistical figures commonly used in higher education to monitor the performance of higher education institutions (HEI), academic degree programs, or their students. Because there is no universal definition of these educational quality metrics, their values should be interpreted carefully with a clear understanding of how they were computed to avoid misleading judgments and unfair comparisons. In this study, we develop clearly defined benchmarking retention, progression, and graduation rates by curating and manipulating well-documented public longitudinal raw data about undergraduate higher institutions over four recent consecutive cohorts, as released by the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), and by the Research Center of the U.S. National Student Clearinghouse (NSC-RC). We aim at proposing generalized benchmarking standards that are applicable to a wide range of undergraduate education contexts. We particularly account for the variability in the desired time window over which some rates are reported, and for the presence of a foundation offered as a preparatory stage of postsecondary education before the college program. In addition to developing overall benchmarking rates, we also derive discipline-specific retention and progression rates for the following selected broad academic specializations: (1) Architecture, (2) Business/Management, (3) Computer/Information Science, (4) Engineering, (5) Engineering Technology, (6) Health/Clinical, and (7) Law. For these seven disciplines; our analysis shows that both retention and progression are best in Engineering (and closely Architecture), while they are poorest in Engineering Technology. The overall benchmarking retention rate after one year of entry is 75.93%, the overall benchmarking persistence rate after one year of entry is 75.22%, and the overall benchmarking graduation rate within 150% of the normal degree duration is 64.2%. Our study can benefit higher education institutions globally seeking criteria for assessing their students’ tracking rates, either for internal quality assurance or for third-party accreditation.