Towards Freshman Retention Prediction : A Comparative Study

—The objective of this research is to employ data mining tools and techniques on student enrollment data to predict student retention among freshman student populations. In particular, the goal is to identify freshman students who are more likely to drop out of school so that preemptive actions can be taken by the university. These models have been compared and evaluated extensively. Our findings show that each model has its advantages and disadvantages and among all the input variables, students' GPA and their financial status have bigger impact on students' retention than other variables.