“Retention rates represent the percentages of respective pools of Fall quarter first-time, full-time entering students who are re-enrolled or transferred within the University in the following Fall quarter,” said Nancy Rogers, an employee at the UConn Undergraduate Research Center. In layman’s terms, the higher the retention rate, the higher the number of students who are re-enrolled at UConn the next semester. The higher this number, the more students of the specified ethnicity that re-enrolled at UConn for the following quarter. When evaluating retention rates by ethnicity it’s easier to see a trend in the data once it is made into a visual form. See the chart on the right to more clearly visualize which ethnicity has the highest and lowest retention rate.
According to UConn’s Office of Institutional Research, there was a 100% retention rate in students of the Native American ethnicity, whereas there was only a 91% retention rate in African American students. That being said, it’s important to keep in mind that there are less than 15 students that fit in the category of “Native American” and therefore the data could be a bit skewed. The most consistently high retention rates belonged to students of the Asian American ethnicity. You can see in the data-set that was used that the white category also includes students who selected “refuse to indicate” when surveyed, so that could affect the visualization of the data as well.
To find out some reasons why there may be a discrepancy based on race, I interviewed Karen Lin, a student employee who works at the Asian American Cultural Center. “In Asian countries, China especially, there is more focus on education and the value of school. Also, a lot of Chinese students who study here are international students, and once they come to UConn it would be difficult for them to move back to China after only one year.”
One important observation that can be taken from this data is that retention rates are increasing for every ethnicity each year. For many different reasons, students of all races are choosing to stay at UConn past their freshman year. Between the rise of our school’s academics and the beautification and modernization of our campus, it’s no wonder that more students are choosing to stay. Let’s hope that over the next few years we see only more increases in which students choose to stay.