Persistence vs Retention
To help international students succeed, we have to start by understanding what they go through every day. When we pay attention to the everyday hurdles international students face, we can stop guessing and start building practical support systems that genuinely help them graduate.
- 1
Listening to the student voice: Taking the time to understand the unique academic, financial, and personal pressures international learners face.
- 2
Building responsive classrooms: Adjusting how we teach and assess to better support students who are navigating a new culture and educational system.
- 3
Bridging the gap: Connecting academic research directly to everyday teaching so students get the practical support they actually need.
Understanding the Metrics
Student Persistence is about the student. It is an individual learner’s drive, motivation, and ability to continue their education and achieve their goals, even if they end up transferring to a different school to do it.
Student Retention, on the other hand, is a school’s metric. It measures a specific college or university’s ability to keep a student enrolled at their institution from year to year. Simply put: persistence is the student’s personal journey, while retention is the institution’s scorecard.
People often use “persistence” and “retention” interchangeably, but they measure two very different things. It ultimately comes down to whose perspective we are looking from.
Building Better Pathways to Graduation
Understanding the difference between persistence and retention completely changes how we approach higher education. If an institution only cares about retention, they are mostly just trying to keep seats filled and protect their bottom line. But if we focus on student persistence, we are actively equipping learners with the tools, resilience, and support they need to succeed in their education—wherever that path takes them.
My research at the University of Windsor and my daily work as a senior marketing instructor are focused entirely on this. By focusing on the actual student experience instead of just institutional numbers, we can create environments where international students don’t just survive the semester, but actually thrive and build a solid foundation for their careers.
