For years, our prevailing view of student retention has been shaped by theories that view student retention through the lens of institutional action and ask what institutions can do to retain their students. Students, however, do not seek to be retained. They seek to persist. The two perspectives, though necessarily related, are not the same. Their interests are different. While the institution’s interest is to increase the proportion of their students who graduate from the institution, the student’s interest is to complete a degree often without regard to the institution in which it is earned. Although there has been much written from the former point of view, much less has been written from the latter. This article seeks to address this imbalance by laying out a conceptual model of student institutional persistence as seen through the eyes of students. Having done so, the article asks what such a model implies about institutional action to promote student persistence.
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