For decades, colleges and universities have measured student success through data: retention rates, graduation rates, and persistence from one semester to the next. The numbers matter. They tell institutions whether students are making it to the finish line. What they don’t necessarily explain is why or why not.
A student who returns for sophomore year becomes part of a retention statistic. But that number does not tell whether the student returned because they found a professor who took an interest in them, received the financial aid they needed, joined an organization that made a sprawling campus feel smaller, connected with an adviser, or simply began to believe that they had a future at the institution.
As higher education confronts questions about affordability, enrollment, and the value of a degree, understanding those experiences is increasingly important. Retention can no longer be treated solely as an outcome to measure after the fact. Colleges must understand the conditions that make retention possible in the first place. And more and more, the research suggests those conditions extend far beyond the classroom.
Retention Rates Only Tell Half the Story
The traditional question is simple: Did the student come back? A more useful one may be: What happened during the year that made the student decide they would or could come back?
The 2025 State of Higher Education study from Gallup and Lumina Foundation offers a glimpse into what is at stake. Almost 32% of currently enrolled students surveyed said they had considered stopping their coursework during the previous six months. While that figure had fallen from 41% in 2022, it still meant nearly one in three was contemplating leaving.
Among students who cited emotional stress as a reason for stopping out, the sources of that stress were strikingly varied: 74% cited anxiety, depression, or another mental health condition, 60% named loneliness or isolation, 59% pointed to school-related financial issues, 56% cited their amount of coursework, and 50% identified job-related stress.
That list complicates the way institutions traditionally think about retention. A student can be academically capable and still struggle to remain enrolled. They can earn good grades while wondering how they will pay rent. They can attend every class while feeling disconnected from everyone around them. They can perform well on an exam and still be one unexpected expense or family emergency away from leaving. Retention, in other words, is not simply an academic problem. It’s an experience problem.
Staying Is Often About Connection
One of the clearest examples comes from research on students’ sense of belonging. The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) measures belonging by asking whether students feel comfortable being themselves, are valued by their institution, and feel part of the campus community. NSSE identifies belonging as an important factor in its demonstrated relationship with persistence, engagement, and student development.
NSSE found that first-year students who intended to return to their institution the following year reported notably higher levels of belonging than those who were uncertain about returning or did not plan to return.
That relationship makes intuitive sense. Students do not experience college as an organizational chart. They experience it through people. The professor who remembers their name. The adviser who notices something is wrong. The classmate who invites them to study. The student organization where they finally find their people. The staff member who helps solve a problem instead of sending them to another office. These interactions can appear small from an institutional perspective. From a student’s perspective, however, they can define the institution.
Researcher Terrell Strayhorn has spent years examining this connection. In one multi-institutional study of dental students, a sense of belonging predicted their intentions to persist even after controlling for GPA and sex. Findings showed belonging influenced persistence intentions three times more than GPA alone.
This should give institutions reason to reconsider an assumption embedded in many student-success strategies: that students who are performing academically are necessarily doing well. Sometimes the warning signs appear somewhere else entirely.
The Professor May Be Part of the Retention Strategy
This is where relationships with faculty and staff become especially important. Students spend much of their college experience navigating systems: registration portals, financial aid forms, learning management systems, degree requirements, advising appointments, and administrative offices. But relationships can transform those systems into a community.
NSSE’s work on belonging connects students’ experiences not only with persistence but with their relationships with faculty, advisers, and other students. Its research also emphasizes advising practices centered on listening, respecting students’ identities and cultures, and demonstrating care for their well-being.
That suggests institutions may need to think differently about who “owns” retention. It is easy to assign the responsibility to an enrollment office or student-success division. In reality, retention may be shaped across campus.
Sometimes Students Don’t Need Motivation. They Need Food, Housing, and Transportation.
There is another danger in framing retention primarily around academic engagement: it can place responsibility for persistence almost entirely on students. But sometimes the barrier to staying in college has little to do with motivation.
The Hope Center for Student Basic Needs estimates that approximately three in five college students experience food or housing insecurity. When the definition expands to include needs such as mental health care, transportation, and technology, the share rises to nearly three in four.
Recent federal longitudinal data provide another window into the problem. An analysis by The Hope Center of data from the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study found that among those who began college in the 2019-20 academic year and were still enrolled in 2021-22, 21.2% experienced food insecurity, 18.6% experienced housing insecurity and 5.5% reported recent homelessness. Overall, nearly one-third experienced at least one of those hardships.
The consequences extend directly to persistence. The Hope Center reports that basic-needs insecurity negatively affects academic performance, belonging, and persistence. In another study examining community college STEM students, 80% who had previously stopped out said basic-needs insecurity played a role in their decision.
A student considering leaving because they cannot secure stable housing does not need another email reminding them to register for next semester. They need the obstacle standing between them and next semester removed.
Support Services Only Work When Students Can Reach Them
Most colleges already offer some combination of advising, counseling, tutoring, emergency assistance, career services, food assistance, and financial support. The existence of a resource, however, is not the same as access to it.
Students have to know the resource exists. They have to understand whether they qualify. They need to know where to go. They may have to overcome embarrassment or stigma to ask for assistance. And sometimes they have to navigate multiple offices before reaching someone who can actually help.
The study of STEM students illustrates the disconnect. Among those experiencing at least one form of basic-needs insecurity, nearly one in five had not used campus resources or public benefits, primarily because they were unaware that those supports existed.
Effective retention strategies therefore cannot end with creating programs. Institutions also have to examine how easily students can find them, whether they trust them, and how quickly those programs can respond when a student is approaching a crisis. The question shifts from “What services do we provide?” to “Can students actually use them when they need them?”
From “At-Risk Students” to At-Risk Moments
Perhaps one of the most useful changes colleges can make is reconsidering the language of risk itself. Institutions often identify “at-risk students” using indicators such as GPA, attendance, financial holds, or demographic information. Those indicators can help institutions intervene. But they can also make risk sound like a permanent characteristic of a student.
In reality, many students experience at-risk moments. Seen this way, retention becomes not just about identifying which students are likely to fail, but also about building systems capable of responding when ordinary life threatens to derail someone’s education.
That requires colleges to connect information that has traditionally lived in different corners of campus. Academic advising cannot be entirely siloed from financial wellness. Mental health services cannot be treated as unrelated to academic persistence. Career development, mentoring, student organizations, basic-needs assistance, and faculty relationships are not separate from student success. They are parts of the same ecosystem.
Retention rates will continue to matter. Higher education leaders, governing boards, accreditors, policymakers, and families need to know whether institutions are successfully helping students complete their education. But a large percentage cannot explain a student experience. A college could improve its retention rate without fully understanding why students stayed. And another could watch its numbers fall without recognizing the collection of solvable problems hiding underneath them.
The institutions that make the greatest progress may be those willing to look behind the data.
