I want my kid to graduate in 4 years. I’m basing my budget on that desired outcome. When I look at sub-70% 4-yr graduation rates it makes me a little nervous. But then, there always seems to be a way to explain it away:
Coops
Lots of people change majors early on at that school
Engineers take longer
Dropped classes as form of GPA protection
A bunch of partiers go to that school
Etc.
Then, with this knowledge it is easy to convince yourself that you’re comfortable sending your kid to that school despite the potential risk of an extra semester or two. Or four. It won’t happen to your kid!
So, I ask, is it worth fretting about these numbers if you’re just going to ignore them anyway? Or, do you definitely use them is narrowing down choices?
We definitely used the four year graduation rate (and the retention rate)! Most (but not all) of the colleges my daughter is considering are above the 70% 4-yr graduation rate and I would be nervous with a lower rate. We are also budgeting for four years since D2 will be following her in two years. It is not the most important factor but seems to be meaningful when budgeting.
My sister told me she was surprised to learn her daughter was not getting the classes she needed to graduate on time. When I told her that her daughter’s college had a 4 year grad rate of 15%, she groaned. Their family had no idea that the college was so impacted. She was a good student but wanted a particular school, with her friends, in a particular city. They are now having to rethink their college budget.
@BearHouse Yeah, the class sequencing is what concerns me the most, especially at the few LACs we are considering. It’s sometimes difficult to determine if classes/sections will be available at the right time. At least, I haven’t been successful in finding this information.
15% would definitely throw a huge red flag for me! Wow.
Our experience has been that LACs are better about sequencing and keeping your kid on track. It is larger state schools where kids get shut out more often to the point where graduation is delayed.
As a person who used to report that data to the federal government (I am an institutional researcher in higher education) I don’t pay attention to it. At all.
First of all, for many schools it is really difficult to compute. Remember that these numbers are for first time/first year students only, they don’t count transfer students or any student who has had any kind of higher education, at all, previous to going to that specific school. For some schools this may or may not count dual enrollment. Depends on how well the college’s database system is set up and how much their IR staff knows what they are doing. There are human beings attempting to run those numbers and the results are often not pretty.
For some schools, small LACs for example, the numbers are easy to compute because students are homogeneous. They all start at the same time and follow a similar course. But when you get to large institutions, especially state schools with a lot going on and thousands and thousands of students, it is a big mess. I don’t trust any of those numbers to be honest.
Also remember that the 6 year grad rate includes the 4 year rate, plus the summer or one more semester. So it is not necessarily taking a full 6 year time. It might simply be one or two classes more which is not a very big deal. If a lot of students do study abroad for example, the 4 year rates go out the window.
Graduation rates have to be considered in context with admission selectivity. If a college gets stronger students at frosh admission and matriculation, then it will generally have higher graduation rates. Of course, such things as frequency of doing co-ops or high-credit majors (e.g. some engineering majors, BArch programs) also matter. Students who must work part time to afford school may also graduate late due to having to take light “full time” course loads (i.e. 12 credits instead of 15-16 credits, needing 5 instead of 4 academic years to finish).
http://www.heri.ucla.edu/GradRateCalculator.php is a graduation rate estimator associated with a research paper at http://www.heri.ucla.edu/DARCU/CompletingCollege2011.pdf . One potentially interesting way of using the estimator is to put in a hypothetical college whose students are all like a specific student, which could give some idea of the chance of the student graduating in 4/5/6 years. E.g. if you put in 100% female, 1200 SAT CR+M, 100% white, A- high school grades, it suggests that a college filled with this student will have 57.5%/72.8%/75.5% 4/5/6 year graduation rates. For a not-as-strong student, it may be worth budgeting a lower amount per year due to the added risk of needing more than 8 semesters of school.
It likely has more to do with the wealth of the school. A school which gets its budget cut (either a state school facing state budget cuts, or a tuition-dependent private school having trouble attracting enough students not getting big scholarship/FA discounts) is more likely to have classes at full capacity. However, getting shut out of class may often be a convenient excuse by a student who does not want to take the open section of the class at 8am.
The bigger departments (usually at bigger schools) are also more likely to offer needed classes every semester instead of once every two years. The smaller schools may have better advising to keep students from making poor scheduling decisions. Students who can look at this chart at http://me.eng.ua.edu/files/2014/05/BSME-Curriculum-Flowchart-Fall-2014.pdf and figure out which courses are highest priority to stay on track may not need much advising help, but those who have trouble figuring that out could use better advising (and lots of schools/departments do not provide such convenient charts of prerequisites).
I had to once report a number that dismal. Remember you are looking at students who started long before now. Right now on the college navigator, you are looking at students who started in 2008 but they are showing these numbers in 2015 so take everything with a grain of salt.
One year I had to report terrible numbers for our little school. Turns out that there was a major changeover in program within the time period that we were reporting. Because we closed one program and started several new ones, our grad rates looked terrible, but they were actually quite good. The problem is that you cannot explain this, the numbers are the numbers. But reality is not always reality.
Does the graduation rate include students who transferred to another school after freshman year in the denominator? That would lower the rate but it doesn’t mean the kids didn’t graduate in four years, right?
At some schools, that’s a major problem. For example at the University of Alabama, the 6 year graduation rate is only 66%, yet the transfer rate is 24%. We have no idea how many of the transfer students ended up graduating at another college.
Also, the number only includes first year students, enrolled in the Fall. Summer and Spring admits are not included. Some schools have a significant number of students that enroll in the summer and/or Spring, sometimes it’s those with less competitive stats.
Colleges are required under federal law to make the 6-year graduation rate available to the public. The law says “150% of normal time to graduate from the longest program”. The methods for calculating the rate are clearly described by the US Dept of Education. Colleges that fail to comply are in violation of federal law.
Schools with 5-year programs also report a grad rate within 200% of normal time to graduate. The 4-year and 5-year rates are also readily available.
Students at public universities and colleges take longer to graduate than students at private universities and colleges. The average percent of students who take longer than 4 years to graduate is 22% at public schools and 12% at private schools. This difference is not attributable to differences in selectivity between publics and privates. Among private schools, there is a small tendency for the more selective private schools to graduate more students within 4 years. This is not as evident among public schools.
The correlation between selectivity (SATs) and 6-year grad rate among all colleges is +.82. The correlation between selectivity and 4-year grad rate is +.73.
Ok. That is what I thought. The numbers don’t tell the story. The fact that the data is so old is something that makes sense, but I never fully considered.
@collegehelp Thanks. I guess it’s like admittance rate to some extent. Even though the admittance rate is something like 6% at HPY, my specific kid has a 0% chance of getting in if he’s a poor student. You have to manage to your specific situation.
The numbers can definitely point you to some questions you might like to pursue, though. For me, the biggest one is the one raised about the difficultly of enrolling in classes needed for your major and/or advising so that you know what those are. (I’ve heard anecdotes about UCB in recent years in this regard, which would make sense in terms of funding cuts, but also, as @ucbalumnus points out, either not be true or be excuses for avoiding classes at certain times or with certain profs.) The book “Paying for the Party” cited examples of students who didn’t understand the required sequencing (i.e., needed better advising) or embarked on a path that closed to them (because they needed higher grades, for example, to get into the XYZ program) which in turn left them scrambling to fulfill requirements for a new major. Knowing a bit about how a school worked for the programs that are of interest could help. I’d also like to know if a lot of students transfer out and why.
At the same time, I would look favorably at a school that had a generous policy/support for time off during the 4 year sequence, particularly if it can be used to get work experience and/or clarify work/life goals. Marching through in 4 years and finishing with a degree in something that you don’t want to do isn’t so great either!
As with so much of this, it can lead you to ask the right questions but on its own, it will provide few answers.
I think those are all good ways to look at it @gardenstategal I’m just not sure you can confidently believe the answers from the school, so you need another source you can trust. Not sure one always exists, so we rely on CC anecdotes. Maybe I’m too cynical.
If you figure in your son or daughter working after getting through college in 4 years the cost of a private education not as expensive as going to public university and taking 5-6 years. I have heard more than a few stories of kids going back to jc to get classes because they couldn’t get classes they need at Cal State school. Being admitted just provides the opportunity to get classes and guarantees nothing much like a parking pass allows you to park on campus but not a guarantee you will actually find a place to park.
@2muchquan , you’re right, the schools won’t necessarily tell you, and all the answers are nuanced. On tours, though, one of the questions we always asked was “what are the classes that are so popular that they fill up right away and/or have a waiting list?” The answers were revealing. (Answers like “Yiddish Literature and the Holocaust” suggest something very different than “Computer Science 101”.)
The other numbers that are bogus are the outcome numbers. You quickly realize that schools that have 95+% of their students employed or in grad school within x months of graduation are the ones with the most affluent (and well-connected) parents who can facilitate or underwrite the options that would otherwise be unaffordable.