CRL Article Uses ARL Statistics to Explore the Impact of the Academic Library on Student Persistence

Using the annual ARL Statistics and IPEDS data on student persistence, Mark Emmons and Frances C. Wilkinson (University of New Mexico) answer affirmatively the question of whether the academic library impacts student persistence. The study, “The Academic Library Impact on Student Persistence,” “explores the relationship between traditional library input and output measures of staff, collections, use, and services with fall-to-fall retention and six-year graduation rates at Association of Research Libraries member libraries.” The authors found that “When controlling for race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status, a linear regression finds that a change in the ratio of library professional staff to students predicts a statistically significant positive relationship with both retention and graduation rates.” The study, published in the March 2011 issue of College and Research Libraries Journal, is freely available online @: http://crl.acrl.org/content/early/2010/04/29/crl-74r1.short