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Failing to Finish: Tracking the 8th-Grade Cohort in Texas

ByBlake Decker

Within higher education circles, most discussions about student success center on 6-year graduation rates for first-time, full-time, degree-seeking students who enroll right after high school graduation. More recent efforts, such as the IPEDS Outcome Measures that comprised our spring data blog series, have started tracking the success of transfer students in earning higher education credentials. While following FTICs and transfer students has become common practice, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) has also been tracking 8th grade students’ progress through high school and post-secondary institutions for more than a decade. In alignment with the THECB’s “Building a Talent Strong Texas” strategic plan, the 8th grade cohort study has been re-visioned as the “Texas Talent Trajectory (T3)” project. This blog post serves as the first in a summer series that will unpack the T3 data to better understand educational attainment trends for 8th graders in Texas.

Texas Talent Trajectory (T3) Data

The publicly-available T3 data provided by the THECB include 8th-grade cohorts for FY2011, FY2012, and FY2013. For context, the typical 8th grade student is 13-years-old when starting their last year of middle school. Students’ educational journeys in the 8th-grade cohorts have been followed for 11 years to determine successful completion of a post-secondary credential. This means a student entering 8th grade in fall 2010 (FY2011 cohort) was tracked through August 2021 to determine whether they earned a certificate, associate’s degree, and/or bachelor’s degree from a Texas public or independent institution. The visualization below shows the pathways from 8th grade to high school graduation to higher education enrollment in Texas to achieving a higher education credential in Texas. “Flow” from one educational status to the next should be read from left-to-right, beginning with the “8th Grade Cohort (1.1M)” node.

PRIMARY OBSERVATION: Out of the 1.08 million students in the combined three-year 8th-grade cohort, 76% (823,083) did not earn a high school diploma and/or a higher education credential in Texas during the 11 years after entering the 8th grade in Texas public middle schools.

NOTES: Current T3 data do not include enrollment and earning of credentials at out-of-state higher education institutions. These data, plus employment outcomes, will be added by THECB in the future. Hovering over the nodes and links in the Sankey diagram show additional information.
1-in-4 students in the multi-year 8th-grade cohort completed a higher education credential in Texas within the 11-year study window.
Abbreviations: "HS" = High School, "HE" = Higher Education
  • Across the three cohorts (FY2011-FY2013), there were 1.08 million 8th-grade students enrolled in Texas public middle schools. This count does not include private middle schools, home-schooled students, or students who moved to Texas after the 8th grade.
  • Approximately 81% (876K out of 1.08M) of the multi-year 8th-grade cohort earned a high school diploma in Texas within 5 years of starting 8th grade.
  • Of the 876K high school graduates, there were 540K (62%) students who first enrolled in higher education at a Texas public or independent institution within 6 years of graduating high school: 57% (310K) enrolled at 2-year institutions, while 43% (230K) enrolled at 4-year institutions. 
  • Higher education enrollees were tracked for six years to determine awarding of a higher education credential (certificate, associate, bachelors) at a Texas institution.
  • For those enrolled at 2-year institutions, 34% of students earned a higher education credential: 12,684 (4%) earned a certificate, 48,781 (16%) earned an associate’s degree, and 42,738 (14%) earned a bachelor’s degree. This means that 66% (206,146) of those students who started at 2-year institutions in Texas did not earn a credential within 6 years of high school graduation.
  • For those enrolled at 4-year institutions, 67% of students earned a higher education credential: 1,102 (0.4%) earned a certificate, 6,090 (3%) earned an associate’s degree, and 146,750 (64%) earned a bachelor’s degree. This means that 33% (75,868) of those students who started at 4-year institutions in Texas did not earn a credential within 6 years of high school graduation.

So What?

Let’s recap the primary observation: 823,083! That is the number of students in the 8th grade multi-year cohort who either did not graduate from high school in Texas (205K), or who did graduate from high school in Texas, but did not complete a higher education credential (618K) in Texas within 6 years of high school graduation. Is there a subset of these students who moved out-of-state and earned a high school diploma and/or a higher education credential elsewhere? Without a doubt, which is likely why the THECB is expanding the data they will be reporting as part of the T3 project in the future. Even with that caveat, Texas still has hundreds of thousands of 8th-grade students from that 3-year cohort without the requisite credentials needed to survive or thrive in a 21st-century economy. As we progress through the T3 data in subsequent blog posts, we will see whether these trends differ based on variables such as gender, race/ethnicity, or socioeconomic status.