By Bill DeBaun, Senior Director of Data and Strategic Initiatives
Reading time: Two minutes
“In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,” Benjamin Franklin once mused. I’d add “the production of new education research that can be hard to keep up with” as a third, but that’s just me. Once again, the National College
Attainment Network (NCAN) brings you findings from briefs and reports on a variety of topics in no more than one sentence each. Yes, really.
Condensing these reports into a sentence each obviously doesn’t do them justice, so please take a deeper dive into those that pique your interest.
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center finds in its newest report that the “some college, no credential” population among US adults grew by 3.6% (1.4
million students) to climb to 40.4 million in July 2021; the report’s data dashboard contains state-level estimates with breakdowns by race, ethnicity, gender,
age, credential type, and more and is an invaluable resource for understanding the re-engagement population.
This report asks, “Are Four-Year Public Colleges Engines for Economic Mobility?” and largely responds, “Yes” because its quasi-experimental design finds that, “for low-income students
and Black, Hispanic, or Native American students, admission to four-year public colleges increases mean annual earnings by almost $8,000 eight to 14 years after applying without increasing the private costs of college,” and although this isn’t
groundbreaking news for members who are well-versed in the benefits of four-year degrees, it’s good to have new data to show to students on the fence.
Dual enrollment has been gaining steam as a policy and practice across the country for years and this meta-analysis of 162 study effect sizes offers support
for dual enrollment with findings that that “participation in dual enrollment programs was positively associated with grade point average, total earned college credits, college enrollment, early persistence, degree attainment, and full-time attendance”
while decreasing time to graduation and total semesters enrolled.
“College prices are falling, actually,” is a hot take you might expect to find more readily on Twitter than from a think tank like Brookings, but this analysis shows that sticker and net prices for both public and private institutions have decreased since about the 2018-19 academic year, which is good news despite the fact that “the net price many lower-income students must
pay is still too high at most institutions.”
That’s it for now – have research you’d like to elevate to the rest of the NCAN membership? Let me know at debaunb@ncan.org, and it’ll appear in a future rendition of this series.
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