Every year colleges and universities across the nation dedicate countless resources to keeping their students enrolled. Because a majority of research has focused on those risk factors which influence retention at the aggregate school level, the efforts of many of these institutions fail to uncover the subtle nuances which influence retention at the level of individual students. Based on these observations, the current research re-analyzes the importance of incoming student characteristics from a new perspective, specifically in light of the dynamics of actual first-year student academic performance