I recently completed a one day mentor/teaching assistant training class at FSU and Dr. Ron Thomas mentioned that on average the retention rate for DL universities is around 50%. The reason he pointed this out was that FSU's retention rate for DL students is 92%. He pointed out that business-wise, it is much cheaper to retain students than to recruit new students. Does the 50% retention rate should reasonable? I think it probably does, but I have no basis for that. If it is reasonable, then FSU's 92% retention would definitely be an accomplishment.
I think 50% is reasonable when you consider that a DL program usually competes with all of the issues that an adult faces in his or her work and family life. To put that in some perspective, when I was a freshman in high school in 1989, we had a freshman-only assembly where the principal noted that there were 450 of us, yet only about 300 of us would graduate. In my semi-rural NC town, over 1 out of 3 students dropped out of high school or did not graduate on time - there were 289 of us at graduation.
Those numbers seem reasonable . . . but so much is not known, in part for lack of major research; in part because quite a few schools and programs regard this as proprietary information which they aren't eager to share; and in part because of how you define "retention." During the 7 years I was involved in marketing two British Master's programs in the US, we were always eager to try to know these things. But at the Edinburgh Business School, for instance, a student has up to ten years to complete the program. At what point does one decide they are no longer active? If they tell you, of course . . . b ut there were more than a few cases where someone we hadn't heard from for 2 or 3 years suddenly 'came back from the dead' and went on with the program. Another issue in retention is whether the student ever intended to finish. In the University of Leicester's MS in Training, for instance, there were four modules. We discovered that a small but significant number of 'dropouts' were really only intending to complete the one or two units of particular interest to them, even though they were listed among the dropouts. Yet another great topic for a thesis or dissertation in education.
