Measuring Educational Success Thru Retention

Measuring success in business tends to revolve around the amount of profit a company generates. Lots of other calculations are used to measure the performance of a business, as an investment professional will surely say, but put simply the goal of business is to make a profit.

Education has not achieved such a focal point for measuring achievement. While some would surely argue that student's grades are the ultimate measure of educational achievement, many have pointed out that grades are influenced by many factors. Simply put learning is not easy to measure.

To help provide some measures of performance colleges and universities have tended to adopt the following three key performance indicators (KPI): retention rate, graduation rate and employment rate.

I have recently become curious to know how student service programs influence these KPI's, especially since university executive (and governments) have adopted retention, graduation and employment rates as some of the primary measures of success. To help understand the KPI's one of my staff has compiled a list of KPI's for Ontario universities. We are now working to gain an understanding of how some student service programs influence these measures.

I thought I would share the retention rate information here that was collected on Ontario universities to help raise awareness and see if others in Student Affairs understand how their work influences retention rate.

• Brock University (2007) - 86.6%
• Carleton University (2007) - 86.7
• Lakehead Univesrity (2007) - 86.7
• Laurentian University (2007) - 83.4
• McMaster Univesrity (2007) - 86.2
• Nipissing University (2007) - 84.5
• Ontario College of Arts & Design (2006) - 85.6
• Queen's University (2007) - 94.7
• Ryerson University (2006) - 87.4
• Trent University (2007) - 81.5
• University of Guelph (2007) - 90.2
• University of Ottawa (2006) - 87.6
• University of Toronto (2007) - 90
• University of Waterloo (2007) - 88.5
• University of Western Ontario (2006) - 91.1
• University of Windsor (2008) - 80.1
• Wilfrid Laurier University (2007) - 88.9
• York University (2006) - 87.9