College Completion Rates Remain Stagnant

Inside Higher Ed

Liam Knox

November 30, 2023

After years of incremental but steady growth, six-year completion rates have been at a standstill since 2020. Is pandemic hangover to blame, or something bigger?

Six-year college completion rates remained stalled this year, according to a new report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

The overall completion rate across higher ed for the matriculating cohort of 2017 was 62.2 percent, a 0.1 percent decrease from the 2016 cohort. It’s the third consecutive year of sluggish completion rates after half a decade of slow but steady growth.

Completion fell slightly at both public and private four-year institutions—by 0.6 percent and 0.2 percent, respectively—but rose by 0.3 percent at community colleges. Completion rates fell by 1.6 percent at for-profit four-year colleges, undoing two years of gains.

Doug Shapiro, director of the NSCRC, said the data bode poorly for the sector, especially public universities.

“This is more bad news for four-year colleges,” he said. “Earlier this year we saw enrollment declines for four-year colleges, and now we’re seeing completion declines.”

Still, completion rates rose in over half of the 50 states, with increases of more than 1 percent in nine of them; only two, Idaho and New Mexico, saw increases over 2 percent. Completion declined by more than 1 percent in only five states, with the largest drops in Rhode Island (2.3 percent) and Washington (2.1 percent).

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