While much has been written about college persistence and retention related to traditional college students (18-22 year-olds matriculating immediately after high school graduation), substantially less has been written about adult students, particularly those whose jobs and family obligations make it difficult to attend college in a traditional face-to-face classroom structure. Many of the published research papers about non-traditional or online student persistence have been single-institution studies, offering little ability to make comparisons between studies because of the lack of common definitions and benchmarks.