The Complex Nature of Student Retention at America’s Community Colleges

Objectives: Responding to Tinto’s call for studies of retention that center on “the students’ view of their experience” (p. 11), this research project reports findings from telephone interviews of 131 students who stopped out at our home institution, a large open admissions community college in the northeast. Our objective was to find out why these students stopped out and what our institution might have done to keep them enrolled. Method: Adopting a phenomenological approach, we analyzed our data set following the principles of thematic analysis. Results: We found that a large percentage of the students we contacted—previously identified as stopping out—had, in fact, either continued their education at another institution or met their educational goals. Furthermore, a large proportion of students we interviewed did not return for reasons that were beyond the control of the institution. The majority of these were related to personal and family matters or work responsibilities. Contributions: Our findings suggest that retention at community colleges is a highly complex, individualized process, with a host of variables that can affect individual students in different ways. Our findings also suggest that retention at community colleges may be more complex than traditional protocols currently in place can accurately measure.