Latest College Completion Rate Remains Flat At 62%

The current national six-year college completion rate stands at 62.2%, essentially unchanged from the last two years, according to the Completing College 2023 Report released today by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC).

The report’s time period covers students entering college for the first time in fall 2017 and completing a degree by June 2023.

Unlike most other calculations of degree completion, NSCRC rates take into consideration all students who begin postsecondary education for the first time each year, enrolling full-time or part-time at two-year or four-year institutions and completing a degree at any U.S. degree-granting institution. The results include those who complete after transferring in addition to those who earn their degree at their starting institution.

Thus, the NSCRC data portray students’ diverse pathways to college completion that increasingly include moving between institutions and across state lines, re-entering colleges after stopping out, and changing between full-time and part-time enrollment.

Completion rates continue to vary considerably by higher education sector. Students starting at private, nonprofit four-year institutions completed at a 77.5% rate, while 67.4% of those beginning at public four-years completed degrees within six years. Those rates stood in marked contrast to the completion rates for students beginning at private, for-profit schools (46.0%) and at public two-year colleges (43.4%).

Completion rates for students starting at any type of four-year institution declined slightly from the prior year’s cohort, while students starting at two-year colleges saw their completion rate increase by .3% over last year.

Asian students had the highest six-year completion rate (74.8%), followed by whites (68.5%), Hispanic (50.1%), Native Americans (47.5%), and Black students (43.4%). Compared to the prior year, completion rates stalled or declined across all ethnicities, with Native American (-2.0 percentage points) and Black students (-0.4 percentage points) posting the largest decreases.

The gender gap in completion rates continues to grow and is the largest since 2008, with women graduating at a 70.8% clip and men at 63.4%.

The six-year graduation rate for traditional-aged students declined a bit to 68.6% for those younger than 20 when they entered college and 58.8% for those between 20 and 24 years of age when they began. The rate for adult learners (students older than 24) held steady at 56.3%.

As with prior reports, students enrolled exclusively full-time had a much higher completion rate (84.3%) than those enrolled exclusively part-time (20.0%) or with a mix of part-time and full-time enrollments (51.1%).

Six-year completion rates increased in more than half the states, with nine states (Arizona, Idaho, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota and Wyoming) increasing by at least one percentage point, compared to only five states that improved by that much in the previous year.

Five states (Louisiana, Massachusetts, Oregon, Rhode Island and Washington) saw their completion rates decrease by one percentage point or more from the prior year.

The report also included an eight-year graduation rate, which stood nationally at 64.7%, a decline of one half of a percentage point from the prior year. Only 2.4% of this cohort completed college in the seventh and eighth years of enrollment, the lowest rate in the past five cohorts.

While the 62.2% six-year completion represents no progress over the past two years, it’s still a substantial improvement over the 2009 cohort, when the national rate was only 52.9%. However, after annual increases for cohorts starting in 2010 through 2015, the completion rate has stalled out over the past three years.

Among the noncompleters, 8.6% were still enrolled in postsecondary education six years after starting, while 29.2% were no longer enrolled anywhere. That combined number represents a major challenge to the nation’s colleges and universities and points to the continuing work that needs to be done in furtherance of what’s often referred to as the “college completion agenda.”

“The rising risk of leaving college short of a diploma could be troubling news for students contemplating bachelor’s degree programs today,” said Doug Shapiro, Executive Director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, in a news release. “Not only have fewer of the 2017 starters completed as of 2023, but the data also show fewer still enrolled, suggesting that this is more than just a matter of slower progress during the pandemic years.”

The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center is the research arm of the National Student Clearinghouse. It collaborates with higher education institutions, states, school districts, high schools, and educational organizations as part of a national effort to better inform education leaders and policymakers. Through accurate longitudinal data reporting, the Research Center enables better educational policy decisions leading to improved student outcomes.

The Research Center currently collects data from more than 3,600 postsecondary institutions, which represent 97% of the nation’s postsecondary enrollments in degree-granting institutions, as of fall 2019.