When universities and colleges closed their campuses and moved all classes and student services online over a year ago, the old student success playbook many used to rely on was rendered useless. With the continued effort in vaccination and safety precautions in place, most campuses will be welcoming back students this fall. At Wednesday’s webinar, student success experts and directors came together to discuss new ways to helps students who had suffered learning loss in the past year.
“[The pandemic] is requiring many institutions to rethink how they approach student success coming out of the pandemic, not only this fall, in the year ahead, but in the years ahead,” said author Jeff Selingo, special advisor for innovation at Arizona State University and moderator of the event. 
Dr. Doug Shapiro
Retention rate and persistence rate are important indicators of early student success. Retention rate refers to the percentage of students who returned to the same school after their first year. Persistence rate is a broader term that calculates the percentage of first-year students who returned to any higher education institutions, counting in students who may have transferred schools due to reasons like financial difficulties, and unexpected academic challenges.
According to a report done by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC) the persistence rate for fall 2019 students dropped by two percentage points to 73.9 percent, the lowest rate since 2012. Before the pandemic, the persistence rate has increased, but rather slowly by only 1.8 percentage points over the past six years.
“If you think of all the work that institutions have put into increasing student success, all those efforts in recent years and how hard it can be to move the needle by very much at all, that two percent really represents a big hit,” said Dr. Doug Shapiro, executive director of NSCRC.
Community colleges were hit particularly hard, showing the steepest decline of four percent in persistence. Shapiro explained that the decline is mostly caused by the pandemic’s impact on underserved communities.
“[It’s] all about the large impacts of the pandemic and the recession on low-income families, first generation students, black, Latinx and indigenous students, all of which the community colleges disproportionately enrolled,” said Shapiro.
