AACRAO Research completed five 60-Second Surveys and four comprehensive reports. Other research-supported work included: supporting the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation credit mobility learning portfolio, partnering with NACUBO to create a joint statement on the use of administrative and student success holds, and supporting WICHE in their work…

This tenth annual High School Benchmarks Report provides updated data on high school graduates' college access, persistence, and completion outcomes. This report was designed with several features particularly tailored to secondary education practitioners and policymakers. First, results presented in this report update last years' findings on high…

There is an increasing requirement in higher education (HE) worldwide to deliver excellence. Benchmarking is widely used for this purpose, but methodological approaches to the creation of benchmark metrics vary greatly. Approaches require selection of factors for inclusion and subsequent calculation of benchmarks for comparison. We describe an…

The Guam Department of Education (GDOE) is a single unified and accredited school district consisting of Kindergarten through 12th grade which administers Head Start, pre-Kindergarten GATE programs, and is piloting pre-Kindergarten classes at selected schools. Their 26 elementary, 8 middle, 6 high and 1 alternative schools serve about 30,000…

This document offers a brief guide to understanding Virginia's system for holding schools accountable for raising student achievement. Virginia's accountability system supports teaching and learning by setting rigorous academic standards--known as the Standards of Learning (SOL)--and through annual statewide assessments of student achievement.…

The collision between funding realities and the paramount goal of increasing educational attainment has brought new attention to ways to reduce postsecondary attrition and get more students who enroll in college to complete a degree or credential. Reductions in attrition are both educationally effective and cost effective. Students reach…

As community colleges work to improve completion rates, these institutions are also developing homegrown metrics that better represent how they are really doing--and, in many places, these metrics are driving the reforms necessary to improve. Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) defines student success as the number of full-time…

School grades provide an easily understandable metric to measure the performance of a school. Parents and the general public can use the informational baseline school grade and its associated components to understand how well each school is serving its students. The school grades calculation was revised substantially for the 2014-15 school year to…

An honors curriculum with realistic graduation requirements should have a respectable graduation rate. This number, when low, can indicate significant problems in the program. But a high graduation rate does not necessarily indicate success. A quality honors program, especially one that remains attentive to students' ability to thrive, might have…

This brief summarizes Internet-based research into other industries that may offer useful analogies for thinking about student attrition in higher education, in particular for setting realistic benchmarks for reductions in attrition. Reducing attrition to zero or close to zero is not a realistic possibility in higher education. Students are…

In this article, the authors share what they have learned in two distinct but complementary research projects that focus on institutional efforts to enhance student persistence and graduation--one funded by the Lumina Foundation for Education and the second by the College Board. Together, these projects have helped them develop a fuller picture of…

When colleges look to compare themselves with others, they are not much different from high-school students chasing popularity: Everyone wants to be friends with the Ivy League, but the Ivy League is really picky about whom it hangs out with. Each year colleges submit "comparison groups" to the U.S. Department of Education to get…

Every college and university, whether public or private; two-year, four-year, or graduate; traditional or online, depends on recruiting and enrolling new students and strives to have as many of those students as possible complete their educational programs. Knowing how effectively an institution is managing the various stages of enrollment is…

The "2019 Nebraska Higher Education Progress Report" is the fourteenth annual report designed to provide the Nebraska Legislature with comparative statistics to monitor and evaluate progress toward achieving three major goals for Nebraska's postsecondary education system: (1) Increase the number of students who enter postsecondary…

The Southern Regional Education Board's (SREB's) case study series highlights best practices High Schools That Work (HSTW) network schools and districts are implementing to better prepare students for further studies and careers. Lee's Summit West (LSW) High School near Kansas City, Missouri, boasts of a 99 percent graduation rate; 93 percent of…