Average Retention Rate At Wisconsin 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 Wisconsin colleges is 73.13% for full-time students and 56.92% for part-time students. 29,361 out of 37,698 full-time first-year students continued their study in next year at Wisconsin colleges. In public Wisconsin colleges, the retention rate is 69% and private schools' rate is 73% By school levels, the retention rate at four-years colleges is 73% and community colleges' rate is 69% in Wisconsin.

The next schools are the top 5 Wisconsin colleges that have the highest retention rate. University of Wisconsin-Madison has the highest retention rate of 95% among Wisconsin colleges. Marquette University and University of Wisconsin-La Crosse also have higher rate of 89% 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 Wisconsin collegesNumbers in parentheses in each column indicate the number of students in the corresponding category.