Of those accepted into a college, colleges with a better history and reputation for offering strong programs will see a higher rate of enrollment. The acceptance rate figures are provided by the IPEDS database from the U.S. Department of Education. The most recently available data is for the winter 2013-14 entering undergraduate class.
The IPEDS database did not have retention rate figures for all of the colleges on our list. We did not, however, want to penalize those colleges without data. To that end, we simply excluded those schools from the rankings in this category.