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Average Retention Rate At Pennsylvania Colleges

What Is The Average Retention Rate In Pennsylvania?

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 Pennsylvania colleges is 74.68% for full-time students and 61.24% for part-time students. 76,673 out of 96,056 full-time first-year students continued their study in next year at Pennsylvania colleges. In public Pennsylvania colleges, the retention rate is 73% and private schools' rate is 78% By school levels, the retention rate at four-years colleges is 78% and community colleges' rate is 68% in Pennsylvania.
The next schools are the top 5 Pennsylvania colleges that have the highest retention rate. University of Pennsylvania has the highest retention rate of 98% among Pennsylvania colleges. Carnegie Mellon University and Villanova University also have higher rate of 97% and 96% respectively. For the ranking, we exclude community colleges and four-colleges with less than 1,000 first-time students.
The following table summarizes the average retention rate in Pennsylvania.
The Average Retention Rate In Pennsylvania
TotalPublicPrivate (not-for-profit)Private (for-profit)
Total74.27%72.89%77.71%71.74%
4 years or high78.47%75.55%79.89%78.25%
2-4 years68.24%62.59%69.55%69.90%
less than 1 year73.32%75.14%69.00%72.64%
The following table summarizes the retention rate and number of students by attending status for Pennsylvania collegesNumbers in parentheses in each column indicate the number of students in the corresponding category.
Retention Rate by Attending Status at Pennsylvania colleges
Retention RateFirst-time StudentsEnrolled in Next Year
Full-time74.68%96,05676,673
Part-time61.24%10,4254,694