Universities

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

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…

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Upon Further Review: Revisiting Pell and Transfer Student Success

This blog post will serve as the conclusion of our series on student success using the IPEDS Outcome Measures (OM) data. This post is a follow-up to our previous post that showed an interesting case for transfer students who were Pell recipients when reviewing completion data at public 4-year institutions across America. Those data showed that Pell recipients outperformed…

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Pell Recipients and the Interesting Case of Transfer Student Success

We continue our blog series on student success using the IPEDS Outcome Measures (OM) data with a look at outcomes for Pell versus non-Pell grant recipients. The Pell Grant program “provides grant assistance to eligible undergraduate postsecondary students with demonstrated financial need to help meet education expenses” (NCES). As previously discussed, the OM data includes categories for all combinations of…

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The Struggle is Real: Part-Time Students and Bachelor’s Degree Attainment

Our previous posts in this blog series on graduation rates using the IPEDS Outcome Measures (OM) data have concentrated on students who initially enrolled as full-time students. Across public universities in Texas in the 2014 cohort, 59% of first-time-in-college (FTIC), full-time students and 68% of full-time transfer students graduated with a bachelor’s degree within 8 years of starting at the…

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The Complexity of Calculating Transfer Students’ Graduation Rates

The National Student Clearinghouse released their “Transfer and Progress: Fall 2023 Report” this week, as the data showed that students transferring into a new institution increased by 5.3 percent when compared to fall 2022. Interestingly, upward transfer students (from 2-year to 4-year institutions) gained the most with a 7.7-percent increase, which is the first increase since the…

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The Relationship Between 8-Year Graduation Rates and Economic Status/Race/Ethnicity

In our previous blog post, we introduced the IPEDS Outcome Measures, which extends graduation rate calculations out to 8 years while also including part-time and transfer students in the metrics. Across public universities in Texas, we saw that 57% of full-time, first-time entering students in the 2014 cohort completed their bachelor’s degree at their originating university…

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Expanding the Timeframe for Success: Introducing the 8-Year Graduation Rate

We continue our blog series on graduation outcomes by introducing what will be a new metric framework for some readers: the IPEDS Outcome Measures. When most people in higher education talk about graduation rates, they are typically referring to the percentage of students who start at a college or university as first-time, full-time, degree-seeking students (i.e.,…

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Are Outcomes Improving at Public Universities? It Depends

In our previous blog post, we explored data from the National Student Clearinghouse’s (NSC) annual update to the “Completing College: National and State Reports” series. In general, the national six-year graduation rate for the fall 2017 cohort was 62.2%. This cohort included full-time and part-time students who were first-time enrollees at two- or four-year institutions, and who completed a…

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Stagnancy in Success: 6-Year Graduation Rates Fall Slightly in 2023

The National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) recently released its annual update to the “Completing College: National and State Reports” series. The primary metric used by the NSC is six-year graduation rates for first-time enrollees, including both full-time and part-time students, at two- or four-year institutions, who complete a degree at any degree-granting institution in the United…