Establishing a method for tracking persistence rates of nursing students: one school's experience

The national nursing shortage is challenging schools and policymakers to develop strategies to increase the number of registered nurses. A tracking system that reports retention rates can provide a critical measure of a school's effectiveness and can assist decision makers in prioritizing where it is best to spend private and public dollars. It can also support a school's efforts to engage in continuous quality-improvement activities. This article explains how one school of nursing developed a method to track its students, how it perfected the method, and how it now uses the findings as part of its ongoing program-improvement activities. The principle players in the creation of the tracking system are identified along with the steps that have been taken to accurately track students in different nursing-program options at the baccalaureate level as well as the masters program and doctoral program levels. Suggestions for sustaining the tracking system and the use of the data are given.