According to the United States Department of Education (2012, 2016), degree completions are a vital measure of overall institution success. Significantly, declining student persistence rates and low degree completions are consistent problems in public colleges throughout the United States. Not only are diminishing retention and incomplete degrees…

Higher education institutions have prioritized supporting undecided students with their major and career decisions for decades. This study used a U.S. public research-focused university's large-scale institutional data set and undecided student's retention and graduation rate predictors to demonstrate how to couple student and institutional data…

This country note presents the results of an analysis of Slovenia undertaken within the Labour Market Relevance and Outcomes of Higher Education Partnership Initiative project. The project was implemented by the OECD with the support of the European Commission with the aim of helping policy makers and higher education institutions enhance the…

The Data Quality Campaign (DQC) has been reviewing state report cards for the past seven years. They continue to examine the landscape of state report cards because they believe states must increase transparency and build trust by sharing information. But after many years, it was time to look at state report cards with fresh eyes. In addition to…

Objective/Research Question: Community college graduation rates are typically quite low, and developmental mathematics enrollment and coursetaking patterns may constrain academic outcomes. To identify ways in which community college graduation rates may be improved, decision trees were utilized to examine the STEM coursetaking patterns of N =…

Understanding how students with low socioeconomic status finance their tuition over time can help us comprehend the impact of students' decisions on their subsequent curricular progress, graduation, or dropout. This work presents a curricular analytics approach using process mining techniques to study educational funding trajectories as processes.…

The following case studies explore how emerging and established Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems have used the Education-to-Workforce Indicator Framework (E-W Framework) to support their data system efforts. Developed by Mathematica in partnership with the Gates Foundation, the framework offers guidance on how states can use data to…

Degree completion rates have recently dominated national debates regarding the value of higher education (Gagliardi et al., 2018). Inherent in this debate is the issue of how to utilize institutional data to evaluate student performance (Hubbard et al., 2020). This process, known as data-driven decision-making (DDDM), has been studied at four-year…

The Partnership for College Completion (PCC) was founded to "advance equity in higher education" by supporting colleges and universities to improve college completion for Black, Latinx, and Pell-eligible students--those groups that experience persistent disparities in completion. Simultaneously, PCC engages in state policy reform to…

The need for STEM transfer students from low-income backgrounds to complete bachelor's degrees is a pressing issue. A substantial portion of those students start their educational journey at 2-year colleges. The lack of transfer and completion of these STEM students is deeply rooted in systemic and structural barriers, which leads to many students…

Drawing on ethnographic research from a small urban high school serving predominantly low-income students in a large northeastern city, this case explores how a school leader seeks to improve the school's graduation rates by analyzing student data. It asks readers to consider the overall organization of the meeting, the role of the principal, the…

With the passage of the Post-9/11 GI Bill in 2008, more than 1.4 million service members and their families became eligible for higher education benefits, and veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan enrolled in colleges and universities in record numbers. The first wave of research about these new student veterans focused primarily on…

This study gathered, analyzed, and compared perspectives of students who were honors-eligible but never began the program, students who began in honors and discontinued their enrollment, and those who were persisting in honors. Broadly speaking (and not surprisingly), the responses of students persisting in honors reflected the most positive…

Historically, students with disabilities graduate from high school at lower rates than peers without disabilities. As a result, many students with disabilities also have poor postsecondary or adult outcomes, such as unemployment or employment in lowpaying jobs. This state spotlight presents strategies the West Virginia Department of Education…

This report provides campus and system leaders with a scan of the current state of reform within the California State University (CSU), together with contextual insight into the obstacles and possibilities for broader scale adoption of coordinated, systemic change. Researchers: (1) Reviewed information on evidence-based student success strategies…