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The Elusive Bachelor’s Degree

Graduation rates at four-year colleges and universities are not keeping up with increasing enrollment numbers, and the outlook is especially bleak for low-income and minority students.

Although the nation’s colleges and universities have seen college enrollment numbers increase steadily in the last quarter century, graduation rates are not keeping up the same pace.

In its analysis of a comprehensive federal database of six-year graduation rates from every degree-granting higher education institution in the United States, compiled by the U.S. Department of Education’s Graduation Rate Survey (GRS), the Education Trust has found that these institutions will fail to graduate nearly half of their degree-seeking, first-time, full-time freshmen within six years.

A Matter of Degrees: Improving Graduation Rates in Four-Year Colleges and Universities reports that after the freshman year, colleges lose an average of 25 percent of students, and within six years, four-year colleges and universities graduate only 63 percent of their freshmen.

When the report zeroes in on minority and low-income students, the numbers are more dismal—only 46 percent of African Americans, 47 percent of Latinos, and 54 percent of low-income, first-time, full-time freshmen graduate within six years.

Kevin Carey, author of the Education Trust report, notes that “recent international studies show that over the last 10 years, the U.S. has lost its first-place position in the developed world in terms of college-going rates.”

On the bright side, higher education continues to see more students enter their institutions than ever before—enrollment numbers are up from less than half of high school graduates in 1975 to nearly two-thirds in 2001. Traditionally underrepresented groups, women and low-income students, are seeing the greatest gains in these enrollment numbers.

The report does offer a road map for change and highlights high-performing institutions that have made real strides in working toward higher graduation rates and closing the racial and socio-economic gaps.

Recommendations for improvement call for increased accountability in higher education, improved alignment between K-12 and higher education, improved access and affordability, increased quality of learning, changes in the way public institutions are funded, and investment in more and better information. The full report is available online at www.edtrust.org.