Graduating At-Risk Students and Comparing Completion Rates

This Inside Higher Ed article is interesting because it deals with graduation rates at colleges that serve students who are at risk of not completing their studies. It is about a study conducted for the Career College Association (CCA) that attempts to pull apart federal student data bases in order to compare how well different types of institutions do with different audiences, with emphasis on how well the different types of institutions do with at-risk students. While this is a preliminary report, it argues that for-profit career colleges do well in serving at-risk students when compared to other types of institutions. The report also presents data on completion rates based on race.

There are a number of factors that are considered to increase attrition rates. These include being older, coming from a low-income background, being the first generation to attend college, studying part-time, working while a student, and more.

In addition to the for-profit career colleges, at-risk students are more likely to be enrolled in substantial numbers at community colleges and open access public colleges and universities.

The problem that the reported research is attempting to address is that the public and many policy-makers tend to take a rather simplistic approach to assessing completion rates, assuming that those institutions that report high completion rates are good and those that have lower rates are not so good. But, it is not that simple. As this article makes clear, there are differences in how institutions operate that complicate the matter. The easiest way to assure good completion rates is to just admit students who are highly unlikely to fail. That is the traditional, elitist approach. But that approach does not hold up when we try to create equity in access and in a time of economic crisis when one pathway to better economic security has been identified as increasing higher education attainment rates. So, institutions that admit those qualified students who have one or more of the risk factors for attrition can be expected to produce lower completion rates, on average, than institutions that have students without the risk factors.

The complexity goes beyond student attributes. Institutional models also impact completion rates. Many institutions allow students to only transfer in a limited number of credits and require the student to take the vast majority of credits for a degree at that institution. But there are other institutional models where emphasis is placed on helping students aggregate credits earned primarily at other institutions and to complete only a limited number of credits from that institution to qualify for a degree. Obviously, the completion rate is going to increase if students take a relatively limited number of credits rather than 90 or 100 that may be required by some institutions to qualify for a baccalaureate degree. The latter type of institution is usually one that serves adult students and we encountered this model variation with Transparency by Design.

There needs to be a way to better understand completion rate variances and to allow for more informed comparisons than simple completion rates across different types of institutions. The career colleges study offers one possible way to address these differences. The researchers state that when the percentage of a college’s students eligible for Pell Grants is at 75%, the career college students graduate at higher rates than at four-year private, four-year public, and community colleges.

Again, this may be a way that we can better compare completion rates across the different sectors and institutional models. At minimum, it will be most interesting to see the final report and to be able to examine the data when it is released later this summer. If nothing else, this study tries to tackle a rather vexing problem with the comparison of completion data.

Please feel free to leave a comment.

Mike