<p>I agree with the observation (I think made by hawkette) that tiny differences at the top of freshman retention rate rankings aren’t meaningful. I do think freshman retention rate becomes an issue when it gets down into the low 90s or below. If nearly 1 in 10 freshmen aren’t returning it suggests something is amiss academically, financially, or socially—or some combination of these. So the interesting question is not which schools have the highest scores, but which have outlying low scores.</p>
<p>Lowest reported freshman retention rates among US News top 50 research universities:</p>
<ol>
<li>Yeshiva 88.0</li>
<li>UC Davis 90.2</li>
<li>UC Santa Barbara 90.5</li>
<li>Case Western 91.0</li>
<li>Georgia Tech 92.0</li>
<li>NYU 92.2</li>
<li>UIUC 92.2</li>
<li>RPI 92.2</li>
<li>U Washington 92.5</li>
<li>U Texas-Austin 92.8</li>
<li>U Wisconsin-Madison 93.2</li>
<li>UC Irvine 93.5</li>
<li>CMU 93.8</li>
<li>Wake Forest 94.0</li>
<li>Lehigh 94.0</li>
<li>Emory 94.2</li>
<li>UC San Diego 94.2</li>
<li>U Rochester 94.2</li>
<li>U Florida 94.2</li>
<li>Brandeis 94.5</li>
</ol>
<p>A high proportion of those are publics, and a number are prominent engineering schools (both public and private). But the explanation can’t be that “publics do poorly on this measure” because some other top publics do very well, including UCLA (97.0), UC Berkeley (96.8), UVA (96.8), UNC-Chapel Hill (96.2), Michigan (96.0)-- all roughly roughly in the same range as Cornell (96.0), Duke (96.5), WUSTL (97.0), Northwestern (97.0), and Harvard (97.2). Also note that half of this low-scoring cohort are privates: Yeshiva, Case Western, NYU, RPI, CMU, Wake Forest, Lehigh, Emory, U Rochester, Brandeis.</p>
<p>Same for engineering schools—Georgia Tech, RPI, and CMU shouldn’t be let off the hook on grounds that “engineering is hard” when such engineering-heavy schools as MIT (98.0), Stanford (98.0), Caltech (97.8) and Cornell (96.0) are doing much better.</p>