Average Retention Rate At Illinois Colleges

The retention rate is the percentage of first-time students who attend and continue their study in next year at colleges. The low retention rate means that more students transfer out to or stop/pause the program at a school. In general, high ranked colleges or special purpose colleges' retention rate is higher than others.

The average retention rate of Illinois colleges is 71.29% for full-time students and 55.19% for part-time students. 54,727 out of 72,516 full-time first-year students continued their study in next year at Illinois colleges. In public Illinois colleges, the retention rate is 66% and private schools' rate is 73% By school levels, the retention rate at four-years colleges is 73% and community colleges' rate is 64% in Illinois.

The next schools are the top 5 Illinois colleges that have the highest retention rate. University of Chicago has the highest retention rate of 99% among Illinois colleges. Northwestern University and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign also have higher rate of 99% and 93% respectively. For the ranking, we exclude community colleges and four-colleges with less than 1,000 first-time students.

The following table summarizes the retention rate and number of students by attending status for Illinois collegesNumbers in parentheses in each column indicate the number of students in the corresponding category.