College Completion Rates Remain Stagnant
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.
