With all of the president’s preaching, lawmakers’ legislating, and foundations’ financing, you might expect college-completion rates to be inching up, at least slightly.
But a report out this week from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center shows that the nation’s six-year graduation rate hasn’t budged.
Fifty-four percent of students who enrolled in college for the first time in 2007 had a certificate or degree to show for it six years later, exactly the same as the previous year.
That’s despite investments of hundreds of millions of dollars in completion strategies since 2006, President Obama’s call three years later for the United States to become the world leader in higher-education attainment, and a flurry of state and federal policies aimed at reaching that lofty goal.
To be sure, the completion push began in earnest partway through the 2007 cohort’s college years. And the 54-percent figure is, at least, higher than the rate the federal government reports, based on a tally widely considered outdated, of full-time students who start and finish at the same college. The clearinghouse followed some two million students as they swirled in and out of college and between, say, a two-year public institution in Tennessee and a four-year private one in Kentucky.
Considering how thoroughly the nonprofit tracks students, a completion rate of just over half—for those attending both two- and four-year colleges—might seem discouraging. But with expanded access to higher education, it could have been worse, says Donald R. Hossler, a professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Indiana University at Bloomington.
More low-income students, and those who are the first in their families to attend college, are pursuing higher education than ever before, says Mr. Hossler, who was the founding executive director of the research center and still consults for it. “Given what we know about their success rates, you would expect to see graduation rates go down,” he says. “In some ways, holding steady over time is good news.”
The report breaks down six-year outcomes by students’ gender, age, full- or part-time status, and sector in which they first enrolled. Women slightly outperformed men, it found, students fresh out of high school beat out the over-24 crowd, few part-timers made it to the finish line, and those who started at a four-year private nonprofit college were the most likely to graduate.
Only one in five students attending college part time had earned a degree or certificate after six years, with younger part-timers struggling the most. Over all, students who entered college older than 24 graduated at a much lower rate (44 percent) than did students who went straight from high school (60 percent). Those who delayed college by just a few years, entering between ages 21 and 24, did even worse: Only 41 percent had graduated after six years.
Early Credit Helps
The completion movement has spawned dozens of strategies to keep students enrolled, from expanding opportunities to earn college credit while still in high school to minimizing time spent in noncredit remedial courses.
When clearinghouse researchers added to the mix students who started college with credit they’d earned in high school, the total completion rate climbed two percentage points, to 56 percent. Two out of three of those formerly “dual-enrolled” students had graduated in six years. Though they represented 16 percent of all students who entered college in 2007, they were not included in the main tally, to allow for a fair comparison with last year’s.
It is hardly surprising that students who showed up with dozens of college credits—sometimes a year’s worth or more—were more likely to graduate. And it’s possible that such students are especially motivated and would have performed better anyway.
While the researchers stop short of declaring dual enrollment a success, they point out that it’s booming. In the 2010-11 academic year, high-school students took more than two million college courses, up from about 1.2 million in 2002-3. Pressure to start earning college credit sooner and to finish faster is expected to intensify over the next decade, as policy makers push strategies aimed at cutting the cost and time to graduation.
To give colleges incentives, the nonprofit advocacy group Complete College America has helped persuade dozens of state legislatures to pass laws basing appropriations to colleges at least in part on performance measures like remedial-course completions and graduation rates.
Few people have been eyeballing the data with the intensity of Stan Jones, the group’s founder and president. The stubbornly low graduation numbers don’t surprise him. “It’s going to take some major structural changes to higher education,” he says, “before these rates change.”
The group promotes several policies it considers “game changers.” One idea, pushing most students to maintain 15-credit-hour schedules throughout college, skeptics dismiss as unrealistic for those who work or are less academically prepared.
But other strategies have attracted early interest: more-structured schedules, for instance, that allow a working student to attend a block of classes that meets all year from, say, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays. Or trimming curricula into prescribed pathways for different disciplines, to counter poor decisions from too many choices.
Of course, limiting courses and majors can make some faculty members’ blood boil, and few observers expect such changes to happen widely anytime soon.
But even those who believe that students should have as much time as they want at the course-catalog buffet acknowledge that their paths to a degree often meander too much. Some delays seem inevitable: Despite efforts to streamline transfers, many courses taken at community colleges don’t count at four-year institutions. And students on some financially strapped campuses can’t get into courses they need to complete a major.
If colleges want to get serious about raising their completion rates, the growing number of disadvantaged students will need the kind of mandatory tutoring and intensive advising Division I athletes get, says Mr. Hossler.
But institutions are constrained by a financing model that’s “turned upside down” when it comes to supporting more students, he says. “Community colleges and regional campuses that are the least well-funded enroll most of the first-generation students who are the least likely to graduate.”
In fact, budget cuts have eroded many tutoring and advising programs that are lifelines for struggling students, says David S. Baime, senior vice president for government relations at the American Association of Community Colleges.
That sector remains at the heart of the completion push, with strategies like mandatory study-skill courses and streamlined transfer agreements. Of course, some campuses have pursued such strategies—and rearranged resources to maintain them—more eagerly than others.
“Our colleges are deeply involved in trying to change institutional behavior to increase completion rates for our students, and those efforts will ultimately be reflected in numbers,” says Mr. Baime. “But the mind-set of an institution isn’t going to change overnight.”
