This article is part of our a continuing series on how California college freshmen are facing a disrupted start to their college careers.

Freshman year can be tricky; the pandemic makes it worse

Amid online classes and other tumult, will freshmen return for sophomore year? CSU campuses show mixed results so far.

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  1. Ginger DeVillers 3 years ago3 years ago

    What was the whole number of students used to derive at the percent? For example, if there was only one black student enrolled and he dropped out then the dropout rate would be 100%. If another school had 100 black students enrolled and 10 dropped out then that school’s dropout rate would be 10% but the two school dropout rates would not be acuratley represented in a percentage comparison data set.

  2. Kate Fisher 3 years ago3 years ago

    Could you please clarify when these students dropped out? Are they students who dropped out during calendar year 2019? Are they students who dropped out during the academic year ending (or starting) with 2019? Are they students who entered in 2019 as freshmen?

  3. Jacob Ingram 3 years ago3 years ago

    CSU and Humboldt State want to be the 3rd Cal Poly with a dropout rate pushing 27% across all demos?

    Come on CSU, maybe have HSU self-study those crappy dropout rates.

  4. Susan Hawk 3 years ago3 years ago

    I am disappointed to not see Native Americans in this.

  5. Claudia Escobar 3 years ago3 years ago

    Can you describe who makes up the denominator for these rates?

  6. Galen Pickett 3 years ago3 years ago

    When I look at the correlations between the different non-retention rates, and then calcualte the principle components of the racial correlation matrix, a single mode accounts for 75% of the total variation, campus-by-campus, and this mode is essentially flat between the ethnicities. My conclusion is that the mechanisms by which different ethnicity students decide to remain after their 2019 year do not vary campus-to-campus. I am not sure what to make of … Read More

    When I look at the correlations between the different non-retention rates, and then calcualte the principle components of the racial correlation matrix, a single mode accounts for 75% of the total variation, campus-by-campus, and this mode is essentially flat between the ethnicities. My conclusion is that the mechanisms by which different ethnicity students decide to remain after their 2019 year do not vary campus-to-campus. I am not sure what to make of that (because the retention rates clearly vary campus-to-campus, and between ethnicities) but the principle component analysis is pretty striking. I would bet this would change if the retention were broken down between pre-STEM and non-pre-STEM.

  7. Deborah Meyer - Morris 3 years ago3 years ago

    This is really interesting, but what is the dropout rate of disabled students in the CSU system due to COVID? Can you research that and break it down by school and ethnicity? The conversion to virtual education has presented many different challenges for disabled students trying to get reasonable accommodations remotely.

  8. Jose Solano Jimenez 3 years ago3 years ago

    How do pandemic dropout rates for freshmen compare to pre-pandemic freshmen dropout rates?

    Replies

    • Alejandro Solano 3 years ago3 years ago

      Great questions. Was wondering the same.