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Completion rates at graduate programs are on the rise, but they may not be as high as conventional wisdom suggests, according to a working paper the National Bureau of Economic Research released this month.
More than 14 percent of Americans 25 and older hold a graduate degree, and graduate students hold nearly half of all outstanding student debt. Despite the popularity of graduate programs, however, there’s been relatively limited available data about graduate student outcomes, especially related to completion rates.
To glean some more insight, researchers examined outcomes in Texas over time. They analyzed a decade of student-level data for 543,611 students who entered graduate programs at public and nonprofit universities in the state between 2003 and 2013. It showed that only 58 percent of graduate students who matriculated during the 2003–04 academic year had completed their programs within six years. However, 68 percent of students who entered graduate school during the 2012–13 academic year had completed their programs within the same time frame.
But completion rates varied widely by discipline. While median graduation rates for students in law and health programs exceeded 80 percent, family/consumer sciences and education programs had median completion rates of around 55 percent.
Graduation rates also varied by institution type, with 72 percent of graduate students who entered programs at flagship public universities graduating in six years compared to 57 percent of those who entered programs at non-research-intensive institutions.
In most disciplines, there’s little difference in the amount of accumulated debt between completers and noncompleters. For example, students who earned education-related graduate degrees had an average of $19,544 in student loan debt, whereas those who started but didn't finish averaged $12,030. Similarly, engineering program graduates amassed an average of $4,230 in debt compared to $3,452 for those who didn’t complete their programs. Health and law programs were exceptions to that pattern, with completers typically owing more than double the debt of noncompleters.
Although completing a graduate degree leads to substantially higher earnings in health and law sectors, earnings are similar—and sometimes even higher—for noncompleters of numerous graduate programs, including those in theology, liberal arts/general studies, visual and performing arts, agriculture, biological and biomedical sciences, communications technologies, and academic doctoral programs.
“The fact that debt burdens are similar for completers and non-completers in many programs suggests that some students may face a high cost of noncompletion,” the report said. “These students have to pay back debt associated with graduate education, but may not see an earnings return to their investment to help them service this debt.”
