Higher education has been touted as critical to social mobility, even greater longevity; however, these benefits accrue with degree completion, and many students who begin college never earn a degree. Using the most recent Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), we sought to understand variation in college completion rates and test…

This paper documents several facts about graduate program graduation rates using administrative data covering public and nonprofit graduate students in Texas. Despite conventional wisdom that most graduate students complete their programs, only 58 percent of who started their program in 2004 graduated within 6 years. Between the 2004 and 2013…

This study addresses an underexplored aspect of diversity at four-year research universities: the impact of international students on their domestic peers. I explore the peer effects of international students, assessing how their presence influences domestic students' academic outcomes. Using the classroom setting as a natural experimental…

This correlational study utilized secondary, longitudinal data to examine the extent to which student-influenced and institution-influenced factors predict the academic success and degree completion of engineering transfer students at public four-year institutions in North Carolina. The sample included students who transferred from community…

For decades, educators and policy makers have decried low graduation rates at US colleges, advocating policies and making investments to improve graduation. We analyze a decade of Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) data for four-year colleges to investigate how much institutions have improved their graduation rates from 2008…

Objective: Six-year cohort completion rates calculated for California community college students--who declared their goal to obtain a certificate, associate degree, or become university transfer ready--averaged just below 50% for cohorts entering the fall semesters between 2007 and 2011. The range of this completion rate varied from 23% to 67%.…

Research suggests that more students with disabilities are pursuing college than in years past. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) was asked to review issues regarding accessibility and accommodations for students with disabilities at colleges. This report examines (1) trends in and characteristics of the population of college students…

Only a quarter of full-time U.S. students complete their desired goal from community college attendance, with the rate of success even lower for Latinx students. This panel-data regression study looks for evidence regarding the expected influence of increasing the presence of Latinx faculty or administrators on cohort completion rates for all…

Two-year public colleges serve roughly one-third of undergraduate students in the United States, and, like other types of colleges across the country, they face shifting population demographics. Additionally, completion rates at two-year institutions have received political and scholarly attention within states and across the nation in recent…

Our paper adds to a growing literature of doctoral training by studying factors that drive time-to-completion based on a new and unique data set from an international European graduate school. While previous research focused on individual factors, we inspect the role of institutional factors and the organization of PhD programs for PhD completion.…

Background and Purpose: Each school year, in the state of Texas, students unexpectedly change schools almost 450,000 times. In the Houston region alone, students change schools more than 60,000 times. These school changes are not random, tend to be geographically contained though not within school districts, and carry significant ramifications in…

This study aimed to replicate, revise, and validate the model of Institutional Performance in Graduation Rate developed by Fung based on Tinto and Astin theories. The sample included 706 public, 4-year, Title IV postsecondary institutions in the United States. Two CFA-SEM models were conducted with the IPEDS 2011-2017 data. The relationships among…

Graduating high school is an important key predictor of this nation's ability to remain globally competitive and a person's long-term financial and social success. At the macrolevel, graduation rates impact a nation's post-secondary education participation, which has been found to be a key indicator of its ability to compete in a global economy.…

College completion rates declined from the 1970s to the 1990s. We document that this trend has reversed--since the 1990s, college completion rates have increased. We investigate the reasons for the increase in college graduation rates. Collectively, student characteristics, institutional resources, and institution attended do not explain much of…

Institutional graduation rates occupy a prominent place in institutional research and public policy. Graduation rates are used in the College Scorecard, state performance funding initiatives, and potentially affect a significant proportion of public institutions revenues. Despite their widespread use, research suggests that institutional…