New Wilson Retention Rate Points to Promising Future
Ryleigh Johnson | April 10, 2025
After the fall semester of 2024, a record high of 91% of students returned to Warren Wilson College (WWC) for the spring of 2025. This number, while potentially influenced by the strength of community WWC felt during Hurricane Helene, is also part of a larger upward trajectory of graduation and student retention rates for the college.
Retention rates are an optional statistic that colleges can collect, which measures the percentage of students who return to the school after their first year. Graduation rates are a national measure of how many students graduate within six years of beginning their degree, meaning the majority of colleges’ most recent statistics concern the cohort of students that entered school in 2017. The federal government has required that this number be publicly available to prospective students since 1990, when the Student Right-To-Know and Campus Security Act was passed.
WWC’s graduation rate for 2023-2024 was 43%, well below the 67.8% national average for private, non-profit institutions. However, these numbers are not as cut and dry as they seem. Over the past four years, WWC’s retention rate has jumped from 58% to 71%. This greater retention rate will likely result in a higher graduation rate, though due to the lagging nature of the six-year measure, those effects may not begin to emerge in the data for several years.
“It's not just wishful thinking,” Carol Howard, associate provost for academic affairs, said. “There are patterns that we track and that all schools track, and that is that if you take your retention rate and subtract whatever the average amount is that you would lose, not just from first year to second year, but second year to third year, you can pretty well predict…what your graduation rate is going to be.”
Howard feels confident that given a 70% retention rate, the school could expect a 55 or 60% graduation rate in the next couple of years.
Increasing the retention rate has been a special focus for the school, including Provost Jay Roberts, who has worked to create several programs designed to identify students who might need extra support early on.
“We now do a four-week progress check…” Roberts said. “We send out a note to the faculty that basically says ‘At the four week check…how are the students doing?’ The faculty will say, ‘There's an attendance concern here’, or ‘There's a grade concern here.’ Then, all that gets aggregated to the center for academic engagement. Then they do specific reach outs to those students, to sort of sit down with them and say…‘You are failing all four of your classes. What is happening? What do we need to do?’”
Lyn O’Hare, the dean of academic engagement, has also been a supporter of these programs. She stressed that a major focus of her work is ensuring that students know where they are situated “in space and time,” so that they know when to reach out for more support.
“I think that as human beings, we best perform…if we know what the rules of the game are,” O’Hare said. “[If you know] you have to be enrolled in at least 12 credits, this is the GPA you need, then I can kind of set myself in space and time…[I can say] I need to focus on my studies. Let's say math is not my thing. So if math isn't my thing, I need to know that, and it means I want to get the things in place to support that math.”
Beyond academics, Roberts believes these programs also help reinforce a sense of community for students.
“When we have to intervene with a student, and it's not just about, ‘Hey, you're not doing well,’” Roberts said. “Some of our retention is because a student, for whatever reason, doesn't feel a sense of belonging. It's not that they're not doing well academically; it's for other things. So if we can remind those students, ‘You're doing awesome, great job,’ sometimes that can be like, ‘Oh, I guess people around here do care about me.’”
Howard also pointed out that graduation rates often fail to paint the whole picture of a college, especially a non-traditional school like WWC. Retention rates and graduation rates do not incorporate data about transfer students, who make up one-fifth of each class year at WWC and graduate at a rate of 76%. They also fail to give context as to why someone left the college.
“There are so many different reasons why [a student might leave]...” Howard said. “When I hear about reasons for departure, I usually hear one student say about five different things because all people are nuanced and they are complex. There's never just one reason why you make a decision and go through a discernment process to say, ‘Am I going to stay here? Am I going to move somewhere else?’”
Roberts, Howard and O’Hare are all hopeful about both graduation and retention rates for WWC, especially given the surprisingly high fall to spring retention rate of the 2024-2025 school year, and are actively looking at ways to recreate the sense of community that the college experienced in that period.
“It is a historic high mark for the college,” Roberts said. “We don't know yet, but one theory is that the hurricane fostered a sense of belonging and purpose…One of the things I remember hearing students say, even though everything was super hard at the time, was they never felt such a sense of purpose and meaning in being a Warren Wilson student.”
While Roberts doesn’t wish for another hurricane, he would like to think about ways tonreplicate the sense of community experienced with Helene.
“Maybe we put our cell phones away,” Roberts said. “Maybe we don't look at our screens, and we don't have classes like we normally do, and we do more stuff like work day and maybe that creates more of a sense of belonging with each other, and maybe that is also part of our retention story.”