As the new semester starts, a lot of things change on campus. As you walk down the halls of the dorms, you notice a few things. Many of the rooms are down to only one person living in them. There are even a few rooms that are completely empty. I began to wonder, why?
When I asked my RA, he told me that many students just can not afford the tuition. Alma College only has a 79 percent retention rate, meaning only 79 percent of the students come back. When you see 79 percent, it actually may seem like a lot. That is until you compared it to many of the other Liberal Arts colleges around the country. To give you an idea, I looked up the rankings of seven well known Liberal Arts schools and their retention rates. I then ranked them by how common it was for their students to return.
- Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts - 98%
- Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut - 96%
- Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo, Michigan - 92%
- The College of Wooster, Wooster, OH - 89%
- Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee - 88%
- Albion College, Albion, Michigan - 84%
- Alma College, Alma, Michigan - 79%
See my school all the way at the bottom there? Why is it that Alma has such a low rate compared to all these others? You may start to think that maybe it is because Alma is more expensive. Actually, all of these schools have pretty close tuition costs:
- Amherst College - $48,526
- Wesleyan University - $48,272
- The College of Wooster - $43,350
- Kalamazoo College - $41,161
- Rhodes College - $41,572
- Albion College - $37,485
- Alma College - $36,890
Your next guess may be that Alma is too tough. Out of some over these schools, Alma is rather easy to get into. Here are the acceptance rates:
- Alma College- 72%
- Kalamazoo College - 69.6%
- Albion College - 60.8%
- Rhodes College - 60%
- The College of Wooster - 59.1%
- Wesleyan University - 17.7%
- Amherst College - 14%
So why is the retention rate so low? I have been racking my brain all week. If you ask anyone around me, they would say that our retention rate has been weighing heavy on me. I feel like every person has the right to have an education. Maybe not in a private liberal arts college in East Jesus Nowhere but an education nonetheless.
Also as surprising as the retention rate is that Alma only has a 61 percent graduation rate. Here are the graduation rates of the other colleges I looked up.
- Amherst College - 95%
- Wesleyan University - 92.1%
- Kalamazoo College - 79.5%
- Rhodes College - 79.3%
- The College of Wooster - 75.4%
- Albion College - 72.7%
- Alma College - 61%
These statistics have definitely made me question how lucky I am for getting into Alma College and staying here. My incoming freshman class was 497 students. Quickly, many of them left before the end of the fall semester. Let’s round that down to around 450 remaining in the freshman class. If we use these numbers only for the freshmen, that means only 356 of us will return to campus and continue on. That also means only 275 of us will graduate. After seeing these numbers, I admit, I am quite shaken.
