Moving The Needle

See What Improved Retention Could Mean for Your Institution

Improving student retention creates more than stronger student outcomes. It can also generate meaningful, sustainable revenue that strengthens your institution’s ability to serve students for years to come.

Carnegie’s Moving the Needle (MTN) program is a performance-based student success partnership designed to help institutions improve retention and graduation rates through data-informed strategy, campus-wide collaboration, and sustained institutional change.

Enter a few details about your institution to instantly see an estimate of the potential additional tuition revenue associated with improved student retention.

Step 1 of 2

About Your Institution

Enter the number of first-time, full-time students in your most recent fall entering class.

Enter your average annual net tuition revenue per student after institutional aid and discounting.

Enter your institution’s most recent first-to-second-year retention rate.

If you don’t have this readily available, you can leave it blank.

If you don’t have this readily available, you can leave it blank.

What Your ROI Estimate Can Show

Your institution-specific estimate will model how incremental improvements in student retention could translate into additional retained tuition revenue over time. The estimate is designed to help you begin answering questions such as:

  • What is the financial opportunity associated with improving retention?
  • How could modest increases in persistence compound across multiple student cohorts?
  • What could the potential return look like through a Moving the Needle partnership?

This quick estimate is intended as a starting point. Carnegie can work with your team to explore the assumptions, institutional context, and student success opportunities behind the numbers.

About Moving the Needle

Moving the Needle brings together institutional data, campus leadership, and student success expertise to build a coordinated approach to retention and graduation.

Through the partnership, Carnegie works alongside leaders across your institution to identify barriers to student persistence, prioritize opportunities for impact, implement targeted strategies, and build the institutional capacity needed to sustain progress.

The result is a student success strategy that is grounded in your institution’s data, supported across campus, and designed to produce measurable improvements in retention and graduation over time.

The Impact of Improved Retention

Moving the Needle is designed around measurable improvements in student success. By helping more students persist and graduate, institutions can strengthen outcomes while generating additional tuition revenue that can be reinvested in their students and mission.

Ready to see what improved retention could mean for your institution? Complete the form above to get started.

Get My ROI Estimate