Timothy Taylor over at Conversable Economist has a great post on college completion rates.
As he notes: one of the worst financial decisions is not completing a college degree. Worse yet: taking out a loan and not completing it. Yet many students do that.
These completion rates are abysmal. A public, 2-year college has a completion rate of 26%? And only 45% of the students complete their 4-year degrees in 6 years!
The following is from “The College Completion Landscape: Trends, Challenges, and Why it Matters,” by Bridget Terry Long
“The conventional way to measure graduation rates is to examine how many students complete a degree within 150 percent of the expected completion time—that is, six years for a bachelor’s degree and three years for an associate degree. Using this metric, research suggests that about only half of students enrolled at four-year colleges and universities graduate within 150 percent of the expected completion time, and the completion rate is even lower for students enrolled at two-year colleges.”
Here’s a table from her paper showing college completion rates across different types of institujtions by this measure.
The following is from “The Policy Imperative: Policy Tools Should Create Incentives for College Completion,” by Sarah Turner
Sarah Turner’s essay offers some additional in-depth background. On the horizontal axis, these graphs show spending per student. On the vertical axis, they show completion rates (again, as measured by completing a degree within 150% of the expected time) Each dot is a college or university. The central insight is that there is a very wide range of completion rates across schools in the same category that spend much the same amount per student.
