Will My Child be Able to Make it Through College?

I get this question from parents a lot and According to IPEDS, or the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, say that five times fast, the average 4-6 year graduation rate for bachelor’s degree seeking college students across the United States in 2011 was 59 percent. So, it is fair to say that yes, according to assumptions we can make from this data, more than half of students who start this year as freshmen will graduate in 4-6 years. But, I know you; you’re more concerned with that mysterious 41 percent of students who don’t graduate in 4-6 years, and you’re worried that your child will be among them. Well, as you probably know from reading numerous conflicting news reports from various media outlets each day, data can mean different things to different people depending on why you’re reading them how you’re using it.

The unfortunate truth about the data used by IPEDS is that it’s incomplete, but it’s not the IPED System’s fault. Tracking every single one of the approximately two million students who enroll in college each year, for 4-6 years, regardless of whether or not they stay in school, drop out, stop out, transfer colleges, or simply disappear from the data, is impossible. IPEDS only tracks students who enroll full-time, for the first time, in the fall, at any given institution and then continue at that same institution until graduation. As you can imagine, many students, in fact most, simply don’t fit into this criteria and are therefore left out of the data. But, nevertheless, there are plenty of folks predicting doom and gloom for our nation’s higher education system based on this incomplete data.

They claim that a college education isn’t worth the financial investment if only 59 percent of students even graduate from college in the first place. Unfortunately, plenty of people believe them and instead of reading and digesting the data for themselves, which is readily available at: http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/ they worry about the sky falling on higher education. To ease your fears about college completion, I’ll tell you a story about a student who, like many other college graduates I’ve worked with, never technically graduated from college.

Vincent has a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, but according to IPEDS, he didn’t graduate from any college. How is this possible? Because IPEDS only tracks students who enroll as first time, full time students each fall semester. And while Vincent did that, he transferred to another college after his first semester and switched to part-time status. He worked full-time, attended college part-time and graduated after 6 years. He then enrolled as a fulltime graduate student, but IPEDS doesn’t track graduate students either. Vincent graduated with a master’s degree two years later. As you can see from this example, this well educated and now gainfully employed man didn’t even meet IPEDS criteria as a college graduate, but he still graduated from college – twice!

The truth is that if your child was admitted to the college or university in which he is enrolled, he is very likely to succeed academically.