College graduation has become an important part of the national agenda, with politicians and philanthropic leaders challenging higher education to do a better job of helping students earn high-quality degrees. That, of course, requires a solid understanding of what the national college graduation rate actually is. There are two primary ways to measure this. One is to calculate an attainment rate—the percentage of some population (e.g. adults ages 25 to 64) who have attained a degree. That’s the number that often gets cited in international comparisons, particularly in recent years as many OECD countries have narrowed and in a few cases surpassed the United States’ historical lead. When President Obama says he wants to retake the international lead in college graduation by 2020, this is what he’s talking about. This number gets regularly updated by the Census and runs about 40 percent—roughly 30 percent of working-age adults in America have a bachelor’s degree and another 10 percent have an associate’s degree.
The other often-used number is the graduation rate: of those students who start college, the percent who finish within a defined amount of time. The overall national graduation rate is calculated less often, because while an individual college can tell you how many entering students got a degree from that institution, they don’t always know if students who left before graduating got a degree somewhere else. Thus, the most reliable source for this number is the Beginning Postsecondary Survey, which is periodically administered by the National Center for Education Statistics at the U.S. Department of Education and tracks a representative sample of students who enter college for the first time in a given year. The last complete BPS survey began in 1996 and tracked students through 2001, six years being the standard time frame for measuring college graduation.
There are lots of ways to slice the data and decisions to make about which students to track, but the two most widely used measures are the percent of all students who started college anywhere and got a degree of any kind—casting the widest possible net in terms of both the numerator and denominator—and the percent of students who start at a four-year institution with the goal of getting a bachelor’s degree who get a bachelor degree, which is the best measure of success for the traditional four-year college path that a great many students still take.
The last BPS found that 62.7 percent of 1996 students who began at a four-year college seeking a bachelor’s degree got one by 2001. Yesterday, NCES released the first results from the newest BPS, which tracked students from 2003 to 2009. It found a nearly identical national graduation rate: 63.2 percent. Of the remaining students, 4 percent earned an associate’s degree or certificate, 8.8 percent were still enrolled at a four-year institution, 2.9 percent were enrolled at a two-year institution, and 21 percent had dropped out.
The numbers for all students were, as before, substantially worse. 30.7 percent of all first-time college students in 2003 earned a bachelor’s degree by 2009, 9.3 earned an associate’s degree, and 9.4 percent earned a certificate. Fifteen percent were still enrolled somewhere and 35.5 percent had dropped out. This represents a small upward tick in bachelor’s degree attainment, from 28.8 percent, but it was balanced out by a decline in associate’s degrees and particularly certificates, which fell from 12.0 percent. In total, the “all students, all degrees” graduation rate fell from 50.8 percent to 49.4 percent, which means that if you’re in a particularly uncharitable mood you would be technically correct in saying that in the 1990s the majority of all college students graduated whereas in the 2000s the majority did not. But it’s not much of a difference and substituting B.A.’s for certificates is a good thing.
Looking past the averages, of course, shows major disparities among different student, degree, and institutional types. Some highlights (unless otherwise noted I’m referring to the initial cohort of all students):
- Only 11.6 percent of students who start at community colleges earn a bachelor’s degree within six years.
- The bachelor’s degree graduation rate for students who start at public four-year institutions is 59.5 percent. At private nonprofits, 64.6 percent. At for-profits, 15.7 percent. Even taking into account 14.6 percent of the latter students who get associate’s degrees (compared to 3.8 at both public and private non-profits), that’s still not a very good number.
- While 45 percent of recent high-school graduates earn a bachelor’s degree in six years, nine percent of non-recent high school graduates do the same.
- Among students who were always enrolled full time while they were in school, 29.7 percent were not enrolled in college and had no degree six years after starting college. Among students who were always enrolled part time, the equivalent number was 71.3 percent.
- Students who were 18 years old or younger when they started college in 2003 were 10 times more likely to earn a bachelor’s degree than students who were 30 years or older.
- Racial gaps widen as students move up the degree ladder. White students starting at two-year institutions have about the same likelihood as black students of earning a certificate, are 60 percent more likely to earn an associate’s degree, and are more than twice as likely to earn a bachelor’s degree. The graduation rate for white students starting at four-year institutions is 62.6 percent, compared to 40.5 percent for black students and 41.5 percent for Hispanic students.
- There’s almost a 30-percentage point gap (40.4 to 69.3) in the graduation rate for four-year students whose parents never went to college compared to students whose parents earned a bachelor’s degree or more.
- Most four-year students in the bottom income quartile don’t earn bachelor’s degrees on time (47.1 percent) whereas three-quarters of top-quartile students (76.4 percent) do.
All in all, this confirms what we already knew: College works well for the kind of student who has been going to college for a long time: white middle- and upper-class children of college graduates who enroll full-time directly after leaving high school. As much as people like to say “nontraditional is the new traditional,” there are still many students like that and the large majority of them manage to graduate (how much they learn is a different matter.)
For everyone else, college graduation is dicey. Most of the growth in higher education has come from older, first-generation, immigrant, and lower-income students. It’s easy enough for skeptics to assert that these students aren’t graduating because they’re not college material. I think this massively discounts the likelihood that institutions whose basic structures and cultures were established decades or even centuries ago, for a particular kind of student, have done a poor job of adapting to the needs of different students going to college in a different time. There’s plenty of evidence that similar institutions enrolling similar students have very different graduation rates, and that some institutions with low graduations suffer from managerial incompetence that shocks the conscience.
11 Responses to College Grad Rates Stay Exactly the Same
jffoster - December 2, 2010 at 12:12 pm
Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3.
kchristi - December 3, 2010 at 6:43 am
I started at a community college as a returning student, and worked full time my undergraduate career. I earned a bachelor’s degree 7 years later–making me a total failure, according to the kinds of statistics discussed above. I now have a Ph.D. and work at a research center and teach at a university.
One of the great things about the U.S. is that it is one of the only places that afford this kind of mid-life career change. Focusing on meaningless statistics like how many students earn degrees within a limited time from the same institution they started (I attended 3 undergraduate institutions) is shortsighted.
christophknoess - December 3, 2010 at 9:24 am
The new BPS numbers confirm what outside observers of our higher ed system and an increasing number of insiders have been saying for a while: the system is broken, too expensive and ineffective. OECD comparisons understate how badly the U.S. has fallen behind: one reason that the U.S. is focused on “post-secondary” education while most OECD peers look at “tertiary” education is that the U.S. definition props up degree attainment rates by including vocational degrees and certificates that “tertiary” education in other countries excludes, ranging from nursing to criminal justice and diesel technology.
Why are things not getting better despite the dramatic increase of resources pumped into higher ed over the last 10 years? I see two main reasons: 1) the additional spending has gone towards “trophy projects” unrelated to undergraduate education, such as campus beautification, research and student edutainment; 2) the college readiness of freshmen (academically and socially) has declined.
In my opinion several things need to happen to see improvements in the 2021 BPS numbers:
1) State boards need to make clear to public institutions that undergraduate learning outcomes is “job #1″. That will take a lot of external pressure, since the system currently is dramatically biased towards research and against teaching in budgeting and personnel matters, from hiring, compensation, promotion to tenure decisions.
2) University systems need to operate as such (i.e., a system) rather than as a collection of competing institutions that demonstrate their presumed academic superiority at the expense of students who get punished academically and financially for transferring between institutions of one system. The recent efforts in California that forces the CC, CSU and UC systems to facilitate transfers should be copied in every state.
3) Learning outcomes at the secondary level need to be improved. The roll-out of Common Core Standards provide a tremendous opportunity to improve the college readiness of incoming students (at least their academic readiness.)
4) As long as a significant proportion of our high school graduates are not academically prepared for college, we need to provide ways of getting them college ready that cost less than remedial and developmental classes on a residential campus at $15k+ per year. Our Community Colleges can play an important role here that is similar to the “cramming schools” that get students from secondary institutions ready for tertiary institutions in other OECD countries.
The Common Core Standards are the one visible reason to be hopeful that our educational decline could be stopped. It is important to note that it was forced on the K-12 system from the outside, against opposition of the K-12 establishment. The higher ed establishment and its lobby in Dupont Circle is opposing efforts to make the higher ed system more accountable to students and society. Unless state boards get ready to apply more pressure on their public institutions to focus on outcomes (effectiveness) and cost (efficiency) in undergraduate education the status quo is likely to prevail.
Improving undergraduate education does not cost money, it takes a mindset change.
http://www.engagedmindsinc.com
drj50 - December 3, 2010 at 9:42 am
I don’t disagree with much that Kevin says here, but would like to suggest that the picture he paints is incomplete.
First, the problem is not simply “managerial incompetence” or schools’ “structures and cultures.” It is just much harder to complete a degree as an adult student studying part-time.
I have taught and administered a program for adult students. Life interferes with study. Almost by definition, the majority of the part-time students’ time and energies are focused elsewhere (primarily work and family). Changes at work, changes in family, changes in health compete with and interrupt studies. And, of course, since they are studying only part-time, the time to complete a degree is longer; the longer the course of study, the more interruptions will occur; and the more interruptions that occur, the greater the likelihood that the student will simply give up.
I also know this first-hand, because I completed (finally) my own PhD while working full-time. I think the fact that I finished — and published — the dissertation suggests that the challenges I faced were not due to lack of ability. They were a function of a demanding (more than 40-hour/week) job, a growing family, and a serious health issue.
Second, there is an easy way to have a 100% completion rate: follow the European model of limiting access to students who have already shown strong academic ability. But this seems, somehow, un-American. As long as we want to give students a chance for a fresh academic start, we’re going both see some students bloom later in life and others fail to graduate. We can talk about what percentage of completions might be appropriate, but unless we change the model of higher education, we will never have anything like a 100% completion rate.
Schools need to look hard at this data, especially, as Kevin notes, schools with similar student populations that have very different rates of student success. But schools are not the sole cause of students’ failure to complete degrees. And schools may be happier to address the issues they can address when they are not blamed for things that they can’t.
tuliptree - December 3, 2010 at 10:04 am
drj50 is right; we as a nation want to offer opportunity to a wider swath of students than do some nations whose grad rates are better than ours is. We are agreed that everyone should have the opportunity to graduate from high school, and we tell HSs students they should all aspire to college. CC’s are open admission, and many, many 4-year colleges are too. Costs are hidden by the availability of loans.
At the same time, this openness ends up pipelining almost all middle class students into college, when many would do better with other post-secondary options. It even pipelines a high proportion of lower-income and working class students into colleges, and saddles them with huge debt. The post-secondary system is never going to be the truth-teller that it should be, for financial reasons. It is up to the rest of us to figure out how to match students’ desires and capabilities with rigorous post-secondary educational options that we and they can afford.
archman - December 3, 2010 at 10:26 am
I remember reading somewhere that the college completion rate in the *1940′s* was only a tad lower than it is today. I believe it was something like 26%.
So basically, decades of “improvements” in higher education haven’t done diddly squat to graduation rates. There *does* seem to be a lot more americans running around today who have had “some college”, however. I suppose that is worth something.
jamesholloway - December 3, 2010 at 11:23 pm
Our interest in graduation rates is understandable, but our disinterest in success is not. There is a success gap between majority students and under-represented minority students, most easily seen as a GPA gap at graduation. Simply earning a degree does not mean that the graduate can pursue their aspirations — if their GPA does not merit consideration for graduate school or professional school, or if potential employers will not consider students with GPA below 3.0, then graduation even from a top tier institution may have only marginal value.
We should be doing more to create college educational environments that help smart, creative, driven, but underprepared and under-supported students, achieve at a high level, rather than just graduate.
bstevens - December 7, 2010 at 3:11 pm
I still do not trust the numbers because of student mobility, student stop-outs, and an extremely poor system of identifying students’ goals when they enroll in college. Also, there are dangers in assuming that a “degree” is the only way to complete an education. Thousands of students (I personally know of hundreds) are hired at very good salaries before completing their degrees and even then, they might go back years later and finish but in a different field in order to get into management. The nature of higher, adult, and technical education has changed so much in the last 30 years that old assumptions just might not work any more.