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/

Will My Child be Prepared to Get a Job Upon Graduation?

This is usually the second question that parents ask me about academics. In other words, “Will he be moving back into his old bedroom at 22 years of age? Because honestly, we were going to turn it into a home office.”

When we were graduating from college this wasn’t really a concern. Students graduated with little or no debt and the economy absorbed us into jobs with decent salaries and benefits. If you moved home at all it wasn’t because you didn’t have a job, it was just to save money for a car or your first home. Today’s students’ prospects are still upbeat, but their pay and benefits have dropped considerably. So, yes, he will be prepared to get a job after graduating from college, but whether his first job will pay enough for him to move out on his own depends on a number of factors including what he studied and where he chooses to live.

As I write this article, I am sitting in a coffee shop in Stillwater, Oklahoma, USA. Many of you have never heard of Stillwater, so I’ll tell you a little bit about it. It is a lovely college town of approximately 48,000 year-round residents, not counting college students. It contains everything you need and most of what you want in a small city. In Stillwater, and in many small to medium cities like it, a single person can live quite comfortably on a $26,000.00 to $30,000.00 per year salary.

Rent for a nice, safe one bedroom apartment costs about $600.00 a month, you can buy a week’s worth of groceries for $55.00, attend concerts and sporting events nearby for little to no cost, and a gallon of gas hovers around $3.30 even though you can commute by bus or bike. Consider a similar lifestyle in Boston, D.C. or San Francisco and you would have to earn between 54-80% more to maintain an equivalent lifestyle.

Now I know, mid-western college towns aren’t for everyone, but this example just goes to show that your child can be employed and live on his own, if that is his goal and he’s willing to move to a less expensive part of the country or even another country as is the trend for recent graduates who want to live abroad before they settle down. A college degree doesn’t guarantee anyone a job, but it does open up considerable choices.