Almost 44 percent of those who began community college in 2019 graduated within six years.
Photo illustration by Inside Higher Ed | XiXinXing/iStock/Getty Images
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s latest report on persistence and retention shows that six-year completion rates held steady from the previous year; 61.1 percent of individuals who started college in 2019 graduated in six years—the same rate as those who began in 2018.
Completion rates at community colleges have been trending upward for the past several years, rising from 41 percent among the cohort that began in 2014 to 43.9 percent in the 2019 group—although that share has remained stagnant over the past two cohorts. In contrast, completion rates at private four-year institutions have declined; though they still have the highest six-year completion rates over all, they’ve decreased almost three percentage points from their height six years ago.
Across all institutions, 9 percent of the 2019 cohort—which saw the spring semester of their first year interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic—haven’t completed their degrees but are still enrolled in their studies, with 57.5 percent of that group now studying at a different institution than where they started. The remaining 29.8 percent have stopped out.
“Students who started in fall 2019 faced the challenges of the pandemic beginning in their second semester, so the fact that their completion rates remain at recent highs underscores the remarkable strength of our higher education ecosystem,” said Doug Shapiro, NSCRC’s executive director, in a press release. “This stability is built on the day‑to‑day efforts of students and institutions to maintain progress toward credentials in a changing environment.”
The overall six-year completion rate has remained essentially stagnant over the past several years, but it has improved by seven percentage points in the past decade; only 54.1 percent of the class that began in fall 2009 finished college within six years, the lowest rate of the cohorts tracked in the report.
Retention has long been a key focus of higher education leaders, but with the so-called demographic cliff looming, some colleges are particularly focused on improving that metric as a means to keep up their enrollment numbers.
While overall completion rates are high, some groups of students complete at significantly lower rates than others. Only about a third of part-time students from the 2019 cohort graduated in six years, and 30 percent stopped out within their first year in college. Black (44 percent), Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (44.5 percent) and Native American (45.2 percent) students had the lowest six-year completion rates, although for Black students the rate has increased significantly from 38.7 percent among the 2011 cohort. Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander and Native American students’ completion rates, on the other hand, have declined slightly in the same time frame.
Completion rates increase with the income level of the student’s neighborhood. Though the lowest-income neighborhoods have the lowest six-year graduation rate, the 2019 lowest-income group was the first to exceed a 50 percent graduation rate, up significantly from 43.1 percent among the 2010 cohort.
Women have a higher graduation rate than men by about six percentage points, a gap that has been relatively consistent over the cohorts included in the report.
And students who came into college with dual-enrollment credits had a significantly higher six-year graduation rate than those without, at 71.1 percent.