Six-year completion rates are up in every institution, according to the latest National Student Clearinghouse Completing College report which studied the fall 2015 cohort.
Numbers show that 62.2% of all students who enrolled for the first time in fall 2015, no matter their age, race, or enrollment status, were able to achieve a credential in at most six years, a 1.2 percentage point increase from the previous cohort. Last year, only 12 out of the 46 states with sufficient data saw completion improvements of at least one percentage point. This year, 32 out of 46 states showed improvement.
Dr. Doug Shapiro, vice president of research and executive director of the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse.
“It’s a hopeful report,” said Dr. Doug Shapiro, vice president of research and executive director of the research center at the Clearinghouse. “I think it makes the results from last year’s completion report, which showed essentially no change, look more like a brief pause in what now appears to be a longer-term trend of steady improvement over the last six years in completion rates.”
That overall upward trend in completion “shows that students and colleges alike are making long term adjustments, making sure that everyone who starts college has what they need to finish,” said Shapiro.
The National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit organization that specializes on data in higher education, gathers data shared by 97% of American colleges and universities. Their Completing College reports are designed to show the state of higher education overall, whether those students attended a two-year, four-year, public or private, profit or non-profit. This year’s study might be one of the last to document what it was like for students before the pandemic, said Dr. Stella M. Flores, an associate professor of higher education and public policy and the director of research and strategy for the Education Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
“This is one of the last classes to not have to experience the pandemic, job loss, changes in technology, adjusting to technology in their work and schoolwork, not impacted by the trauma in the hospitals,” said Flores. “What we can learn from this cohort is going to be really important, because it’s going to be the cohort we look back to, comparing back to an age of stable inequality, versus severely disrupted and impacted inequality.”
