The College Completion Study We've All Been Waiting For

To say that I was thrilled to read the preview of the upcoming Second College Completion Study (I’m going to call this the SCCS) is an understatement. I’ve been loosely following the progress of this study since I first learned about it around 2011. In short, the study hopes to complete and “clean up” data on 4 and 6 year college completion rates.

Until the National Clearinghouse Student Research Center published its first report on college completion last year, the best data we had was from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), which as I mention in earlier posts doesn’t offer a complete picture of 4 to 6 year college completion rates since it only counts first time, full time, students who enroll in the fall semester each year and do not transfer or stop out.

This year’s SCCS will include all students across 95% of institutions even if they enrolled part time, transferred, or started in the spring semester instead of the fall. It also tracked dual enrollment students; these are usually high school students who enroll concurrently in college to get a head start on credit hours. These students were left out of last year’s study and I am excited to see how the inclusion of the 374,095 dual enrollment students changes the results. Obviously, if this group of students has the motivation, socio-economic advantages, and parental support to start college level classes while still enrolled in high school, these 374,095 students should make a profound impact on completion rates.

The study will be available next month, so I’ll keep you posted!

SCCS - http://nscresearchcenter.org/

IPEDS –  http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/