By Sara Lipka

Joyce Hesselberth for The Chronicle

A national conversation about the value of college took hold this past year, as attention to affordability and completion yielded proposals both to alter the federal financial-aid system and to measure students’ progress more effectively.

After a decade-long surge, enrollment appeared to have tapered off. It dropped two-tenths of a percent in the fall of 2011, to 21.6 million undergraduate and graduate students, the federal government’s most recent figures say. Several factors may have contributed to the slight dip. Economic recovery can flatten college enrollment, and state budget cuts reduced capacity at some public institutions. Enrollment fell most sharply at for-profit colleges, as federal scrutiny of that sector continued.

Over time, though, more high-school graduates have gone straight to college. For the high-school Class of 2012, the college-going rate was 66 percent, compared with 62 percent two decades earlier.

Even so, demographic change presents challenges for enrollment. In the next few years, the total supply of high-school graduates will fall slightly, then hold relatively steady, ending a two-decade boom, according to projections by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, known as Wiche.

Not until 2020-21, Wiche’s projections show, will there be another phase of steady growth in the number of high-school graduates nationally.

Finer-Grained Data

The focus on college completion sharpened this past year, as campus leaders pursued national goals for higher-education attainment, and more states tied a portion of colleges’ appropriations to performance measures such as graduation rates.

Dissatisfaction with the federal government’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or Ipeds, drew new attention to the more-comprehensive tallies of the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit organization that collects enrollment and degree records. Ipeds’s method of counting only first-time, full-time students who stay at the same institution is widely considered outdated.

The clearinghouse’s research center noted this year that including students who took “nontraditional” paths, such as transferring before finishing a degree, put the national completion rate for two- and four-year colleges at 54 percent, compared with 42 percent otherwise. After six years, 30 percent of students had dropped out, and 16 percent were still enrolled somewhere.

The more complete count was telling. Part-time students, for instance, struggled: After six years, only 21 percent of them had graduated; 68 percent had dropped out. “As a nation, we have been selling a dream that doesn’t really exist—that large numbers of students can go part time on a regular basis and complete a degree,” Donald R. Hossler, a professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Indiana University at Bloomington, told The Chronicle in November.

As several organizations and college systems developed their own measures of success, six major higher-education associations teamed up in June on a tool to let institutions share the clearinghouse data. “This effort recognizes that the student experience today is very different from the one people have lodged in their memories from 50 years ago,” said Diana S. Natalicio, president of the University of Texas at El Paso. “It’s important to use metrics that capture the real picture.”

Responding to the desire for better data, the Department of Education announced last year that it would start to include part-time and transfer students in its figures. But those changes are not likely to be carried out quickly.

As for tuition, relatively good news didn’t mean much. For in-state students at four-year public colleges, the average annual increase was smaller than it had been in more than a decade, but still reached 4.8 percent, according to the College Board. Students’ average net price, what they pay after any grant aid at those colleges, was up measurably for the second year in a row.

Nationally, about a third of students reported that financial concerns had interfered with their academic performance, according to the National Survey of Student Engagement. More than a third of seniors and more than a quarter of freshmen said they hadn’t purchased required academic materials because of the cost.

Advocates and experts declared the federal financial-aid system broken. They wondered—given that the system serves two-thirds of undergraduates—if it should still promote only access or also completion. Sixteen organizations that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation asked to “reimagine” the federal financial-aid system came to some consensus that it should provide consumer information beyond what the federal government has recently required, and that student-loan borrowers should automatically enter income-based repayment plans after graduation.

Last winter a group of private-college presidents decried the escalating use of merit aid and pledged to focus their support on needy students. But their discussion prompted an investigation by the Justice Department this spring into whether a “possible agreement” would restrain competition in violation of antitrust laws. The department closed its investigation “without taking action,” it said in letters to college representatives this month.

College for What?

Two-thirds of students who earned bachelor’s degrees in 2011 graduated in debt—an average of $26,600, according to the Institute for College Access & Success.

For all the concern about whether college is worth it, bachelor’s-degree recipients were faring much better in the job market than were their less-educated peers, on average. But not all graduates prospered. “It matters what you major in, and it matters if you get a graduate degree,” Anthony P. Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, told The Chronicle in May.

As in the past, a majority of students said they went to college to get an education. But career-related reasons gained ground in 2012 in the annual freshman survey by the Higher Education Research Institute, at the University of California at Los Angeles. The highest proportions of students on record said the ability to get a job and to make more money were very important reasons to go to college.

And they were confident they’d do well. Nearly seven in 10 students rated their academic ability either above average or in the top 10 percent compared with their peers, according to the survey. And yet this past year’s freshmen reported the lowest ratings of physical and emotional health since 1985, when researchers began asking.