By Bill DeBaun, Senior Director, Data and Strategic Initiatives
Reading time: Three minutes
It can be hard to keep up with all the latest reports in education related to college access and attainment. Acknowledging that, here are summaries of four recent interesting pieces of research. Are you a National College Attainment Network (NCAN) member who really likes data, evaluation, and research? Email me at debaunb@ncan.org to get involved in our data, evaluation, and research channel on the NCAN Online Practitioner Community!
New data on transfer outcomes
“Tracking Transfer” is one of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center’s (NSCRC) regular reports, and the latest edition “examines students entering community college in the fall
2017 term and their transfer-out and bachelor’s completion rates within six years.” This version also includes “students who enter a four-year institution in the 2017-18 academic year after transferring from a community college.” Some of the top highlights
include:
Just 32% of students who started at a community college in fall 2017 transferred to a four-year institution within six years. Among transfers, about 50% completed a bachelor’s degree within six years.
“Students who entered community college in fall 2017 with prior dual enrollment had higher transfer-out (46.9%) and bachelor’s completion rates (60.1%) than first-time-ever-in-college students.”
In what feels like a blow to the idea of “2+2” transfer pathways, just 22.4% of community college students who transferred to a four-year institution earned a bachelor’s degree within two years of transferring. Expanding the post-transfer window has
a big impact though; 67% of those who transferred with an award earned a bachelor’s within four years.
Persistence was high for transfers. After transferring, 82% of community college students re-enrolled at their four-year transfer institution in the following academic year.
“Income Gap Between Householders With College Degrees and Those With High School Degrees but No College Widened Over Last Two Decades.”
The headline from the US Census Bureau really says it all. Data from the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS
ASES) shows that between 2004 and 2024 “The median household income of those with at least a bachelor’s degree rose by about $15,000 or 13.1%, while the median household income of those with less than a high school diploma (the
smallest educational attainment group) climbed by about $3,500 or 10.4% (percent increases for the two groups did not significantly differ from each other).”
You’re all going to want to flag this one for your case-making, I suspect.
We need more college graduates. Like, a lot more.
Georgetown University’s Center for Education and the Workforce estimates that by 2032 the United States “will need an additional
5.25 million workers with postsecondary education through 2032, 4.5 million of whom will need a bachelor’s degree or higher.” The biggest shortfalls of bachelor’s-attaining workers will occur in the management, healthcare practitioners and technical,
educational instruction and library, and business and financial occupations. Read more from Laura Spitalniak at Higher Ed Dive.
Where enrollment fell since 2010, maybe that was okay?
Preston Cooper at the American Enterprise Institute is out with new data showing that “undergraduate
college enrollment fell nearly 20% between 2010 and 2023…The worst fifth of colleges as measured by student outcomes lost nearly half their undergraduate enrollment between 2010 and 2023. The best fifth increased enrollment by 8%.” Cooper identifies
two big implications:
“First, the decline in college enrollment may not be the crisis some believe, as the drop is occurring mostly at low-quality institutions, which students may not be better off for having attended. Second, student
choice is a more powerful driver of trends in higher education than observers often appreciate; students seem to have some sense of variation in college quality and make their enrollment decisions accordingly.”
Cooper’s measurement of
student outcomes and which institutions count as “the worst” comes from an index constructed from student loan repayment rates, student loan non-default rate, completion rate, and earnings after enrollment.
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 might appear in a future edition of this series.
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