Correlation between Retention and Graduation Rates in Higher Education

ECONOMICS AND QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS
LINEAR REGRESSION REPORT
Student’s Name
Institution Affiliation

1. Introduction
1.1. Purpose
This report is meant to investigate the correlation between the retention rate and graduation rate,
the ability of the student to persist through to graduation. This is meant to explore whether
retention rate of student in the university/college can influence graduation rate, the number of
students graduating after years of study. This has been facilitated by doing simple regression
analysis of the retention and graduation rates data of different universities and colleges.
1.2. Background
Every year in the United States there’s a good number of students who fail to complete their
college degrees.( Fishman et al., 2017) A third of the undergraduates students leave college
after the first year of study and others require more than four complete their studies. This clearly
reveals that retention rate of student in the university has been decreasing across the year,
thereby posing great economic issues. This mean the expected number of graduates by
institutions and government has continually decreases also. Chance of students defaulting the
loans that they obtain form government agencies to fund their education is higher as most
students when they drop out of school they are not able to pay up their Education loan due
their unsatisfying qualification in the labor market. The exploration of the correlation between
graduation rate and the retention of university will be of great economic significance in a
country.
2. Method
This section provides overview and the technique used to analysis data. To investigate the
association between graduation rate and retention rate retention rate and graduation rate data of

29 different universities and colleges was utilized. This date was sourced from Online Education
Database. To explore the association between graduation rate and retention rate various
statistical analysis were done include the following. First is determination of descriptive statistic;
mean, standard deviation, minimum and maximum. Second, developing scatter plot with
retention as independent variable to determine whether the relationship between graduation rate
and retention rate is linear or nonlinear. Finally, simple linear regression analysis of retention
rate and graduation rate data, to determine the equation that can used to estimate graduation rate
using retention rate and correlation coefficient ( R ), that indicates the level of association
between graduation rate and retention rate. The software that was used in analyzing data is
SPSS and Microsoft Excel software.
3. Results
a. Mean, Standard deviation, Minimum and Maximum
The following table shows the descriptive statistics of the retention rate (RR) and graduation rate
(RR) of 29 institutions of higher education.
From the table, it’s clear that RR has a higher mean, standard deviation and maximum than GR.
On the other hands GR has a higher minimum value than RR. A higher standard deviation
Descriptive Statistics
N Minimum Maximum Mean Std.
Deviation
RR(%) 29 4 100 57.41 23.240
GR(%) 29 25 61 41.76 9.866
Valid N
(listwise)
29