Average Retention Rate At Tennessee 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 Tennessee colleges is 70.73% for full-time students and 58.45% for part-time students. 33,835 out of 49,960 full-time first-year students continued their study in next year at Tennessee colleges. In public Tennessee colleges, the retention rate is 67% 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 Tennessee.

The next schools are the top 5 Tennessee colleges that have the highest retention rate. Vanderbilt University has the highest retention rate of 97% among Tennessee colleges. The University of Tennessee-Knoxville and Belmont University also have higher rate of 88% and 84% 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 Tennessee collegesNumbers in parentheses in each column indicate the number of students in the corresponding category.