Why YOU Should Care About College Graduation Rates

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When high school students start looking for colleges to apply to, they rarely consider college graduation rates. Even with the sky-rocketing costs of college, most families still don’t consider graduation rates. They may notice it when a school advertises its four-year graduation guarantee but I suspect most just dismiss it as not applying to “their” situation.

But college graduation rates are misleading!

Then you have voices in the media from experts who claim that graduation rates are misleading. The reasons include:

They don’t actually measure the value of the degree.
They are more of a reflection of a college’s inputs rather than any affect the college may have on the student.
They don’t reflect the fact that the majority of students are no longer “traditional” 18 year-olds attending a residential college full-time.
They don’t track transfers in or out of a college.
They don’t account for the variation of the quality and preparation of the students at different colleges and universities.

I’m sure there are reasons I’ve missed and most of them are legitimate concerns in terms of evaluating a college’s ability to graduate students.

It is kind of funny though. I spent my graduate school years looking at high school graduation rates and let me tell you, having poor, academically unprepared students with significant outside distractions didn’t cut the high schools any slack. And most high schools don’t get to pick their students, much less charge them to attend class.

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Do you have a traditional college student?

So let me tell you why YOU should care.

First, the YOU I’m talking about is the family that is preparing to send their 18 year-old high school graduate to a full-time college expecting to only pay for four-years of attendance to avoid soul-crushing debt.

That YOU is exactly the YOU that is measured by current college graduation rates.

Unfortunately, the graduation rates commonly reported are the six-year rate for four-year degrees but it’s a start.

Who is responsible for transfers?

For YOU, the argument that the rate doesn’t track transfers is irrelevant. Why? Because transferring, for whatever reason, tends to be an expensive business in that not all courses transfer or that transfer students don’t generally qualify for as much financial aid. (This is not referring to starting off at a community college and transferring to a 4-year institution.)

Of course, there are always mismatches and students will need to transfer through no fault of the college. But if there is such a high number of transfers that it’s affecting the graduation rate, then the college has to take some responsibility since it admitted them.

A colleague of my husband was adjunct faculty at a private college with a low graduation rate. She said that the school explained the low rate was the result of so many of their students being first generation college students and that most who left the college eventually graduated from the local public university.

I’m pretty sure that explanation doesn’t show up in its admissions presentations.

Make Meaningful Comparisons

The fact is that colleges with similarly situated students will have very dissimilar graduation rates. That’s not just “interesting” information. That’s information that represents the chances of graduating on-time with a minimum amount of debt. It adds up to real dollars.

It’s one of the reasons why I use the five-year graduation rate for public colleges and the four-year rate for private ones. I figure you can attend an extra year at a public college and still pay less than attending four-years at a private school. The cost difference is worth the possibility of a fifth year because of difficulties in getting required classes for graduation. Of course, that also means delaying earning income for a year which should be considered as well.

College Graduation Rates Example

Sometimes it’s easier to demonstrate this point by working backwards from the graduation rates. The table below lists colleges with a 4-year graduation rate between 70% and 75%. According to IPEDS, there are 65 schools with 500 or more full-time students in this category including 13 public institutions.

Now consider how different they are. The acceptances rates among the schools range from a low of 5% at Stanford to 97% at Keiser University-Ft Lauderdale. The lowest reported 75th% ACT Score was 23 at Mount Carmel College of Nursing while Stanford had the highest at 35. Twenty-four schools had 75th% scores below 30.

The lowest endowment per student was at The College of New Jersey with only $5,821 while the highest of $1,594,147 was at, you guessed it, Stanford. Not surprisingly, Stanford had the highest Instruction per Student at $114,640. The lowest, $5,204, was at Keiser University-Ft Lauderdale.

If you’re just looking at colleges with a 26 75th% ACT score, you’ll find 4-year graduation rates ranging from 14% to 71%. If you consider only colleges that accept 85% of students, the lowest graduation was 19%, the highest was 69%.

The point is that graduation rates can represent real differences between colleges and families should benchmark them just as they would any other data point in their college search.

Ultimately, YOU are planning on graduating from a four-year college. If most of the students don’t, shouldn’t you know why?

Learn More

All of the information in this table is part of the DIY College Rankings Spreadsheet.

Colleges with 4-Year Graduation Rates between 70% and 75%

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Name	Type	State	Full-time Under-grads	4 yr Grad Rate	% Admitted	% Freshman Receiving Pell Grants (19-20)	Avg Net Price 2019-20
Chapman University	Pri	CA	6,843	73	58	18	$44,327
Loyola Marymount University	Pri	CA	6,383	75	50	11	$48,758
Pitzer College	Pri	CA	802	75	17	12	$30,095
Stanford University	Pri	CA	5,752	74	5	18	$20,023
Westmont College	Pri	CA	1,224	71	70	24	$32,418
Quinnipiac University	Pri	CT	6,482	73	82	16	$41,815
University of Connecticut	Pub	CT	18,090	73	56	21	$22,233
American University	Pri	DC	7,453	74	39	15	$37,319
University of Delaware	Pub	DE	17,912	73	66	19	$19,747
Florida State University	Pub	FL	29,072	72	32	25	$12,815
Keiser University-Ft Lauderdale	Pri	FL	10,947	70	97	67	$31,371
Ringling College of Art and Design	Pri	FL	1,588	72	69	22	$53,496
Rollins College	Pri	FL	2,456	74	61	18	$33,216
University of Miami	Pri	FL	10,737	72	33	14	$31,726
Augustana College	Pri	IL	2,358	73	57	23	$24,233
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign	Pub	IL	32,107	72	63	28	$13,517
Butler University	Pri	IN	4,347	73	76	13	$42,627
Hanover College	Pri	IN	1,018	71	69	35	$22,389
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology	Pri	IN	1,952	75	77	14	$43,606
Taylor University	Pri	IN	1,724	72	70	22	$25,991
Wabash College	Pri	IN	868	72	63	24	$24,412
Transylvania University	Pri	KY	958	70	92	29	$26,054
Assumption University	Pri	MA	1,970	70	81	17	$30,232
Clark University	Pri	MA	2,185	70	47	23	$30,617
Emerson College	Pri	MA	3,626	75	41	14	$47,594
Endicott College	Pri	MA	2,840	75	70	15	$37,665
Stonehill College	Pri	MA	2,389	74	69	13	$35,508
Wheaton College	Pri	MA	1,660	72	77	22	$28,518
University of Maryland-College Park	Pub	MD	28,160	70	51	15	$17,643
Kalamazoo College	Pri	MI	1,426	72	74	25	$27,596
Gustavus Adolphus College	Pri	MN	2,220	75	71	27	$26,701
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities	Pub	MN	28,989	71	70	18	$17,729
University of St Thomas	Pri	MN	6,126	70	87	23	$31,799
Saint Louis University	Pri	MO	6,847	73	56	21	$27,872
University of North Carolina School of the Arts	Pub	NC	890	71	36	27	$11,940
Creighton University	Pri	NE	4,330	71	64	12	$32,355
The College of New Jersey	Pub	NJ	6,898	75	51	18	$24,617
Binghamton University	Pub	NY	13,889	72	43	25	$19,061
Hobart William Smith Colleges	Pri	NY	1,808	72	62	22	$38,247
Ithaca College	Pri	NY	4,785	73	76	20	$35,904
Le Moyne College	Pri	NY	2,369	70	75	37	$23,937
Niagara University	Pri	NY	2,654	71	92	35	$19,172
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute	Pri	NY	6,262	74	57	16	$40,661
Syracuse University	Pri	NY	13,832	71	69	13	$47,177
United States Merchant Marine Academy	Pub	NY	1,028	75	24	11	$4,574
University of Rochester	Pri	NY	6,100	75	35	18	$36,254
Miami University-Oxford	Pub	OH	16,079	71	92	12	$24,345
Mount Carmel College of Nursing	Pri	OH	562	73	81	51	$14,454
The College of Wooster	Pri	OH	1,921	70	65	22	$27,923
Juniata College	Pri	PA	1,264	70	67	30	$24,524
Lebanon Valley College	Pri	PA	1,621	71	78	23	$27,963
Messiah University	Pri	PA	2,424	75	78	25	$27,641
Saint Joseph’s University	Pri	PA	3,945	75	80	13	$35,780
Susquehanna University	Pri	PA	2,214	72	73	24	$26,597
University of Scranton	Pri	PA	3,499	74	79	20	$36,093
University of the Sciences	Pri	PA	1,382	71	71	25	$31,497
Ursinus College	Pri	PA	1,484	71	80	19	$31,400
Rhode Island School of Design	Pri	RI	1,736	70	27	16	$40,048
Salve Regina University	Pri	RI	2,084	73	75	17	$35,620
Furman University	Pri	SC	2,294	75	65	9	$37,761
Southern Methodist University	Pri	TX	6,616	73	53	9	$41,444
Texas Christian University	Pri	TX	9,448	70	48	11	$40,220
The University of Texas at Austin	Pub	TX	37,404	70	32	23	$16,892
Christopher Newport University	Pub	VA	4,653	70	76	13	$25,393
Saint Michael’s College	Pri	VT	1,492	72	88	16	$31,096

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Why YOU Should Care About College Graduation Rates