Making the Grade at San Diego State

Making the Grade at San Diego State: ... San Diego State has been lauded nationally for its success on this front. An article titled “Walking the Walk on Student Retention” by the Education Trust, a Washington-based nonprofit that seeks to address achievement and opportunity disparities among students, stated: “The university not only collects and analyzes data, it uses it to identify at-risk populations, to develop and test the outcome of interventions and to measure progress in retention and graduation rates over time and for particular groups.”

... According to the university’s statistics, among freshmen who attended classes in 2010, 88.3 percent were enrolled again in fall 2011, a significant increase from the previous year when 82.3 percent of freshmen continued to their second year. SDSU’s current six-year graduation rate is 65.7 percent.
Dr. Geoffrey Chase, dean of undergraduate studies, also notes that the racial gap in retention has almost disappeared. For example, Chase says that in 2010 the freshman retention for students of color was 87.4 percent, less than one percent lower than the overall rate. In 1999, he says the freshman retention rate was 75 percent and 70 percent for students of color.