It sure is great - raise the retention rate

The post from which the snip below is taken caused me to think back to 1996, when I did a study about retention rates at Illinois. I had 5 years of data on all courses offered with both the ten-day enrollment (after the add-drop period has ended) and the final course enrollment.  I looked at the ratio of those two numbers, focusing on only undergraduate course that had 10 or more students in the ten-day number.  Students who add with the permission of the instructor after day ten would make that ratio look a little higher.  I simply assumed there weren't too many in that category.

The finding was that in non-engineering courses that ratio was so high (typically 95% or higher) that it could hardly be improved upon by an outside intervention, such as introducing an online learning component to the class.  Even in engineering, the average was something like 91% or 92%.  There is a lot of churn in those first ten days, but not a lot afterward, at least at Illinois from fall 1991 through spring 1996.

This study was done in the dark ages before there were ERP systems.  Now we have those.  I wonder why data like this isn't made publicly available, if not at the course level than aggregated a bit higher (say all 100-level courses offered in a department aggregated in one lump so as not to cast aspersions at a particular instructor with a lower ratio).  If some facts about retention rates at particular institutions were more widely known, it would make the discussion about whether they should be targets of improvement a more informed discussion.

Maybe someday we might even ask, if the students survived the course and got a decent grade in it, did he or she actually learn something that will be retained in their mind.  That's the retention rate we should care about.

Researchers cast doubt about early warning systems' effect on retention | Inside Higher Ed via kwout