Resource Alert! New National College Completion Rates Available

Non-profit organizations, school districts, and families spend significant resources helping students apply to college, choose the right one for them, and navigate the institutions they enroll in. Are all these investments paying off? How might your individual organization compare to national and state-level trends?

The outcomes of these investments are far off into the future and it can be hard to answer the question in the short-term. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (about) publishes a report called Completing College that can help your organization contextualize your outcomes against vetted data.

This report’s helpful if you need to know:

• Reliable nationwide college completion rates from a high quality data source

• College completion rates disaggregated by several key student demographics such as race/ethnicity, gender, and student age at entry

• College completion rates disaggregated by the type of college a student attends (2-year/4-year, public/private)

• How your current college completion outcomes compare to nationwide and state-level trends

• What kind of goal your organization should consider for a college completion target

This report won’t tell you:

• College completion rates disaggregated by student socioeconomic status or first-generation college student status

• Completion rates in a time span shorter than six years

• Whether students took time off before completing their degree

• How many times a student transferred institutions before completing their degree

Bonus resources

The nice thing about this report is that the NSCRC also releases an interactive dashboard and provides an appendix in an Excel workbook. These resources are helpful if you want to do more analysis and get a level deeper than the outcomes NSC summarizes. The workbook will also help you to create custom analyses.

Some of My Takeaways

The NSCRC report includes some high level takeaways , which I won’t repeat here since they’ve already done a great job articulating them. Below are some of my own thoughts about the data that may be helpful for others in the postsecondary access/success space.

College Completion by Race/Ethnicity. Degree completion rates are increasing across all student race/ethnicity groups in these analyses. Each group’s gains range between 2-percentage points and 5-percentage points over the past five years. That might not sound like a lot, but remember these trends are occurring over very large samples of thousands of students. A rising tide is lifting all boats - however, the gap between race/ethnicities in college completion rates has remained consistent over time.

For example, for the class starting in 2011, there was a 29.4 percentage point difference between completion rates for Black students (39.5%) and Asian students (68.9%). The gap between groups remained the same, 29.4 percentage points, between Asian (73.7%) and Black (44.3%) four years later in the 2015 cohort. It is important to celebrate the improved outcomes for all students, but we must continue to acknowledge and address major issues of equity in postsecondary success outcomes.

Source. NSCRC Completing College, New Longitudinal Data Dashboard, Tab 3, Figure 5: National Completion Rate Trends by Race and Ethnicity

Additional Nuance in College Completion. The report highlights some nuances that get overlooked in completion conversations like how many students complete their degrees at different institutions, and how many continue to be enrolled after six years. What strikes me about these charts is that they help call out how non-linear a student’s path can be.

Source. NSCRC Completing College, New Longitudinal Data Dashboard, Tab 1, Figure 2: Detailed outcomes by Starting institution Sector.

Improvements at Two-Year Colleges. Degree completion rates for students who start their higher education at public 2-year colleges have increased five percentage points over the past five years. Although completion rates for students at these institutions lag behind those of four year institutions, the trend is encouraging given that community college cohort’s increase by over 26,200 students nationwide.

Source. NSCRC Completing College, New Longitudinal Data Dashboard, Tab 4, Figure 5: National Trends by Enrollment Type

The Future of College Completion. The next few years of data will be interesting. While we don’t know exactly how long these students took to complete their degree, they were further along in their studies when COVID-19 arrived and changed the postsecondary experience. With fewer steps between them and a degree, these students could have persisted to completion. We know that fewer students are enrolling in college in the pandemic era. And those who were enrolled in their first year when the pandemic hit persisted at lower rates. Will completion rates follow the decline in persistence? Or will completion rates rise because students who may have been at high risk for dropping out didn’t enroll in college in the first place? Only time will tell.