Of the nearly 2.62 million full-time and part-time U.S. students who started college in fall 2024, 85.8% continued their enrollment into the spring 2025 term, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center's latest Persistence and Retention report released Thursday.
By fall 2025, a full year later, 77.1% of those U.S. students were still enrolled in college, either at the same institution where they started or a different one. In New Jersey, the persistence rate was higher with 81% of the 57,515 students in the 2024 college cohort still enrolled.
The report considers students “retained” if they remain at their starting institution and “persisted” if they are enrolled in any institution of higher education in subsequent terms.
The 77.1% persistence rate for the 2024 cohort of U.S. students entering their second year of college in fall 2025 is the highest it has been in a decade. In 2015, the college persistence rate for U.S. students was 75.7% and 78.6% for New Jersey students.
The report found that most fall 2024 U.S. students remained enrolled at their starting institution in spring 2025, with an 83.2% retention rate for the cohort. Only 2.6% continued their enrollment at another institution in their first spring term.
A year after entry, in fall 2025, 69.1% of the U.S. 2024 cohort were still enrolled at their starting institution, while 8.0% had transferred to another institution.
In New Jersey, 86% of the 2024 fall cohort continued at the same starting institution in spring 2025. A year later, 74% remained enrolled at the same starting institution, the report said.
Nationally, among starting fall 2024 bachelor’s degree students in the top 10 major fields, those in Engineering programs persisted into a second fall of study at the highest rate (93.1%), while those in Computer Science persisted at the lowest rate (85.0%).
For associate degree students, those in Biology had the highest second fall persistence rate (74.1%), while those in Security and Protective Services had the lowest (57.8%). Starting certificate-seekers in Liberal Arts had the highest persistence to their second fall semester (64.9%), while those in Security and Protective Services had the lowest (54.0%).
Part-time U.S. students starting college in fall 2024 also had a decade-high persistence rate for their second fall semester (54.1%). That is 1.3 percentage points higher than the fall 2023 cohort.
To read the complete report, go here.
