Every year Bethel tracks how many freshmen stay at Bethel for the next year – this year, numbers went up.

McKenzie Van Loh | News Reporter

Records have been shattered in terms of Bethel’s fall to fall retention rate. The amount of returning Bethel students starting in fall 2015 is 87.8 percent. This is up 3.7 percent from last years retention rate of 84.1 percent. The numbers provided by Tim Eaton, Vice President of Enrollment Management has left faculty in high spirits.

“We have done a lot of work on advising,” Bethel’s vice president and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Deborah Sullivan-Trainor said.  We are speaking more intentionally together as a community about how we improve the student experience.”

Sullivan-Trainor has been part of a long term plan called Moving the Needle since 2013. This is a student success and retention project that has recently proved to be successful.

“There are two things that lead to retention. There tends to be students having a sense of belonging and thriving academically. So we are trying to work with those things,” Sullivan-Trainor said. “Student’s success and retention is really important. When students stay, its because they are succeeding. We want to keep them cause they are having a really good experience. The work that we do here is about the students.”

Bethel plans to continue to enhance the Moving the Needle project in order to make sure students thrive and succeed in the future.