Economy

Bad News on Rate of Students Going to College and Getting Degrees

Jon C. Ogg

Published: November 17, 2015 11:40 am

Last Updated: January 13, 2020 5:06 pm

More and more students who go to college and university are not finishing. They are starting the efforts, but ending without degrees. That is the message from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. While negatives were shown across the board, the biggest drop in the completion rates was seen in the for-profit college sector.

The group has released its fourth annual college completions report, and the message is the impact from the Great Recession on the fall 2009 college freshman class. It was represented as being the case for every type of collegiate institution and every student age group.

A fresh report from the National Student Clearinghouse showed that of the 2.9 million students enrolled, the overall national six-year completion rate for the fall 2009 in-coming students was 52.9%. For a comparison, that is down 2.1 percentage points from the fall 2008 class of incoming students.

Another negative here is that this was said to be twice the rate of the decline observed in the 2014 report. The rate at which students were no longer enrolled, without having earned a degree, increased 2.7 percentage points. That figure rose to 33% from 30.3%.

The National Student Clearinghouse said:

Without the considerable efforts to improve student outcomes at the institutional, state, and federal levels, these declines could have been even worse given the demographic and economic forces at play. This year’s completions report helps practitioners and policymakers to identify where opportunities for improvement may be the greatest.

Completion rates decreased by 1.7 percentage for students who started at four-year public institutions, dropping to 61.2% from 62.9%, and 2.1 percentage points for students who started in four-year private nonprofit institutions, where completion rates fell to 71.5% from 73.6%. The largest drop seen by this group was in the completion rate for students who started in four-year, private for-profit institutions: to 32.8% from 38.4%.

More information on the full breakdown is available in the study’s press release.

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