College Completion Rates Trending Up

Fewer college students are stopping out before finishing their degrees, according to data the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center released this morning. The report found that students who started college for the first time in 2018 had a six-year credential completion rate of 61.1 percent—a 0.5-percentage-point increase over those who started in 2017.

It’s the highest six-year completion rate of the 12 cohorts tracked in the first annual “Yearly Progress and Completion” report, a new report series containing elements previously published in the NSCRC’s “Yearly Success and Progress” and “Completing College” reports. Eight-year completion rates for students who enrolled in college in fall 2016 were also the highest among those 12 cohorts, at 64.7 percent.

“Higher completion rates are welcome news for colleges and universities still struggling to regain enrollment levels from before the pandemic,” Doug Shapiro, executive director of the NSCRC, said in a news release. “Even as fewer students are starting college this fall, more of those who started back in 2018 have stayed enrolled through to the finish.”

Indeed, a report released earlier this week by the National College Attainment Network showed that fall enrollment of 18-year-old freshmen has dropped 5 percent since fall 2023. While some experts said the botched FAFSA rollout may have contributed to that decline, Shapiro said at a news conference Tuesday that it’s far too soon to draw any conclusions about how the FAFSA fiasco might influence completion rates in the future.

What he does know is that the upward trajectory of college completion rates shown in the NSCRC’s inaugural “Yearly Progress and Completion” report was driven by “fewer students stopping out,” leading “to more students being able to finish within six years than in previous years,” he said.

The data also showed that income level remains “a highly stable predictor of completion rates,” he said during Tuesday’s news conference, noting that in every cohort, students from higher-income families had markedly higher completion rates than their lower-income peers. “There has, however, been some progress in narrowing these gaps over time.”

For example, students in the highest quintile of neighborhoods, sorted by income, who entered college in 2010 had a six-year completion rate of about 70 percent, compared to 40 percent for their peers in the lowest-income neighborhoods. But within the cohort that started college in 2018, 76 percent of students from the highest-income neighborhoods graduated in six years compared to about 48 percent of their low-income peers.

And Black, Hispanic and mixed-race students also made six-year completion gains during the 2010s, with Black student completion rates climbing nearly seven percentage points between the 2011 and 2018 cohorts.

Shapiro said he couldn’t speculate about what exactly is pushing more nonwhite and low-income students to graduate college. But the newly designed data set, which breaks down how many students participated in dual enrollment, shows that exposure to college coursework in high school may be one factor at play.

Seventy-one percent of students in the 2018 cohort who earned credit through dual enrollment completed a college credential in six years, compared to 57.4 percent of students without dual-enrollment experience.

Although more four-year colleges have recently delved into offering dual-enrollment opportunities, such programs have long been a staple of community colleges. And according to the report, community colleges have experienced some of the biggest gains in six-year completion rates of any sector, growing from about 37 percent for the 2007 cohort to 43.4 percent for the 2018 cohort.

Dual-enrollment experience was also associated with a boost in completion rates across almost every racial demographic and income level. For instance, nearly 60 percent of students in the 2018 cohort who came from the lowest-income neighborhoods but participated in dual enrollment graduated in six years, while just 43 percent of their peers who did not participate in dual enrollment did the same.

“The dual-enrollment movement was taking off pre-pandemic, so it’s great that they’re able to show that dual enrollment clearly had an outsize impact here,” said Charles Ansell, vice president of research, policy and advocacy for Complete College America.

“If that’s the case, there’s two things to focus on,” he said, noting that one of the biggest advantages of dual enrollment is its ability to reduce time to completion. “One is to focus on getting more students into dual enrollment, particularly in high schools that have low college-going rates. And then, two, to make sure dual-enrollment students are seeing their coursework as academic pathways into community colleges and four-year colleges so we’re maximizing the utility” of dual enrollment as a driver of higher completion rates.

In addition, Ansell said, ensuring that students are declaring majors early and receiving semester-by-semester advising and guided pathways, co-requisite remediation opportunities and tuition assistance, and other basic needs supports will be crucial to preparing an educated workforce.

“All of those things were beginning to jell around 2018, so I remain hopeful we’ll see higher grad rates into future years,” he said. “But we need to accelerate on the things that are known to work.”

He cautioned that a lot has changed since 2018, including a massive enrollment drop driven by the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I am nervous about what we’re going to see with six- and eight-year graduation rates for students who were only a year in—or were the opening cohort—when the pandemic hit,” he said. “That’s when you’re going to see this intersection with enrollment in the grad rate cohort, with size and performance.”