How Many First-Year College Students Don’t Return?

There is new research out from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center on first year retention and persistence.

Students who started college in fall of 2022 were a little more likely to return to college in the fall of 2023 as sophomores, the study found. Overall, 68.2% of college first-year students returned to their college the next year, up from 67.2% in the previous year. That is just those who came back to the same college, which we call retention (because they are retained at the college from which they started). If we could those who returned to college, but went to a different college, that number goes up 8.3 percentage points to 76.5%. So 8.3% transferred to another institution.

These numbers are going in the right direction, but not fast enough. For one out of four college freshmen to leave after one year is really not ideal at all. Think about all the time and effort to get into college. And then after one year (or less), it’s over. You have no degree, and likely have some debt from that first year.

Why do students fail to return? There are a few reasons. When I was director of the CIRP survey program at UCLA we created a survey module that looked at this question and received these answers from students who planned to leave at the end of the year. A major reason is not feeling like you belong at that particular college. Another is funding, as students and their families struggle to continue to pay tuition and other costs of college. In particular, people leave when they do not see the relevance of what they are learning and compare that to the cost of college. For some, they were not academically ready for college, and struggle academically.