Average Retention Rate At Mississippi 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 Mississippi colleges is 69.17% for full-time students and 40.00% for part-time students. 17,179 out of 24,956 full-time first-year students continued their study in next year at Mississippi colleges. In public Mississippi colleges, the retention rate is 65% and private schools' rate is 63% By school levels, the retention rate at four-years colleges is 69% and community colleges' rate is 56% in Mississippi.

The next schools are the top 5 Mississippi colleges that have the highest retention rate. University of Mississippi has the highest retention rate of 88% among Mississippi colleges. William Carey University and Mississippi State University also have higher rate of 87% and 81% 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 Mississippi collegesNumbers in parentheses in each column indicate the number of students in the corresponding category.