Students with various Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition (DSM-5) diagnoses have increasingly enrolled in colleges and universities. Although graduation rates are lower for this group, some students succeed, and mentoring programs are increasingly part of this success. The purpose of this article is to describe a…

High school graduation represents a pivotal milestone with far-reaching implications for an individual's future in social, economic, professional, and personal spheres. Despite its significance, only approximately 85.5% of students in the United States successfully earn their diploma each year, with groups such as black, Hispanic, American…

The rising cost of higher education has led to increased tuition costs for students and their families, forcing more students to secure larger amounts of debt to finance their educational pursuits. Although scholars have explored how student loan debt accumulation influences higher education persistence and graduation, an unexplored area of higher…

On January 22, 2023, the Florida Department of Education (FDOE) released high school graduation rates for the State of Florida and the District. The FY23 Federal High School Graduation Rate includes standard diplomas but excludes special diplomas and General Education Diplomas (GEDs). Students with Disabilities (SWD) on Access Points curriculum…

Reversing the trend of US STEM graduation rates lagging other industrialized nations requires that we look at the entire pipeline of potential STEM students, including the vast number that start their journeys in remedial math classrooms in two-year colleges. Most research to date has focused on either Learning Support (LS) success or STEM…

About one-third of college students drop out before finishing their degree. The majority of those remaining will take longer than 4 years to complete their degree at "4-year" institutions. This problem emphasizes the need to identify students who may benefit from support to encourage timely graduation. Here we empirically develop machine…

Multiple factors influence a student's success in high school graduation. Individual factors such as disability, racial or ethnic identity, and gender may result in inequity in the school environment, interfering with learning and possibly leading to poorer educational outcomes. This secondary analysis of student educational records (N = 3,782)…

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…

On-time high school graduation is an important topic in educational research, policy, and practice. However, no comprehensive meta-analyses had been conducted on this topic. The current meta-analysis reviewed 47 articles published from 1985 to April 2022 and aggregated the effect in four dimensions: student background, family support, school…

This dissertation measures and describes the factors that impact doctoral student persistence. Using a mixed methods cases study design, I analyzed institutional student record data, survey data on caregiving responsibilities, and data from semi-structured interviews with PhD students at a STEM-focused, public research university in the American…

This paper reports on the results of a study of 6,654 unique students on the type of research-related activities (e.g., undergraduate research and internships) they participated in while at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona). Results indicate that the odds of graduating for students who participated in…

This quantitative study examined the comparative factors of academic success between ECHS students (ECHS) and non-ECHS traditional college students, and utilized secondary data from National Student Clearinghouse and an East Texas community college. The enrollment of students in ECHS and non-ECHS traditional college students guided the study. The…

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…

At least one third of all U.S. college students don't get a degree, even six years after they enroll. Earlier research focusing on trends through 1990 found broad declines in college graduation rates, especially among men attending less-selective four-year schools. Since then, however, the picture of college enrollment has changed dramatically,…

This paper aims to illustrate the extent to which structural changes and institutional modifications within the higher education landscape influenced the rates of completion, dropout, and changes in the subject of study of Swiss university students between 1975 and 2018. Using administrative data, our results indicate that the completion rate and…