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 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.

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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.

It isn’t as if this school was providing tremendous financial aid for the students. These students were encouraged to take out large loans for a quality, private college education that they never completed but would still have to pay for. The reality is that the school accepted them-it can’t charge them $50,000 a year and then wash its hands of the matter.

Well, actually, they can because that’s what is happening.

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 58 schools with 500 or more full-time graduates in this category including 10 public institutions.

Now consider how different they are. The acceptances rates among the schools range from a low of 4% at Stanford to 86% at Hope College The lowest reported 75th% ACT Score was 25 at Simpson College while Stanford had the highest at 35. Nineteen schools had scores below 30.

The lowest endowment per student was at The College of New Jersey with only $5,709 while the highest was $1,539,051 was at, you guessed it, Stanford. Not surprisingly, Stanford had the highest Instruction per Student at $113,338. The lowest, $8,087, was at Rockhurst University.

If you’re just looking at colleges with a 26 75th% ACT score, you’ll find 4 year graduation rates ranging from 14% to 67%. If you consider only colleges that accept 85% of applications, the lowest graduation was 12%, the highest was 82%.

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%

Name	Type	State	Full-time Under-graduate	4 yr Grad-uation Rate	% Admitted	% Freshman Receiving Pell Grants (18-19)	Avg Net Price 2018-2019
Chapman University	Private	CA	7,046	72	56	17	$43,767
Loyola Marymount University	Private	CA	6,548	73	44	13	$47,292
Stanford University	Private	CA	6,996	73	4	18	$16,779
Westmont College	Private	CA	1,312	75	65	17	$32,663
University of Connecticut	Public	CT	18,229	73	49	20	$20,042
University of Delaware	Public	DE	18,378	72	71	16	$17,539
American University	Private	DC	8,207	75	36	15	$40,469
University of Miami	Private	FL	10,701	73	27	13	$33,102
Agnes Scott College	Private	GA	990	70	65	43	$21,893
Illinois Wesleyan University	Private	IL	1,616	72	61	30	$28,912
Lake Forest College	Private	IL	1,517	71	55	36	$26,148
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	Public	IL	32,854	70	59	25	$14,660
Butler University	Private	IN	4,509	73	73	14	$39,923
Saint Mary’s College	Private	IN	1,421	72	81	28	$26,906
Wabash College	Private	IN	866	71	64	35	$21,285
Dordt University	Private	IA	1,319	70	75	27	$26,570
Drake University	Private	IA	2,830	73	68	21	$30,265
Simpson College	Private	IA	1,161	70	80	50	$20,145
Clark University	Private	MA	2,281	73	53	20	$30,158
Endicott College	Private	MA	2,809	70	69	13	$36,498
Simmons University	Private	MA	1,607	72	73	29	$30,841
Springfield College	Private	MA	2,158	70	68	25	$29,706
University of Massachusetts-Amherst	Public	MA	22,491	74	64	20	$22,927
Hillsdale College	Private	MI	1,431	74	48	0	$23,230
Hope College	Private	MI	2,917	72	86	20	$29,248
College of Saint Benedict	Private	MN	1,731	75	80	24	$28,177
Gustavus Adolphus College	Private	MN	2,212	73	69	33	$21,707
Saint Johns University	Private	MN	1,604	70	78	23	$27,126
Rockhurst University	Private	MO	1,454	70	64	25	$22,688
Saint Louis University	Private	MO	6,691	71	58	19	$31,098
Saint Anselm College	Private	NH	2,014	74	75	12	$34,164
The College of New Jersey	Public	NJ	6,981	75	49	19	$23,945
Binghamton University	Public	NY	13,845	72	41	28	$17,424
Hobart William Smith Colleges	Private	NY	2,045	73	66	21	$37,761
Ithaca College	Private	NY	5,739	70	73	21	$34,942
Siena College	Private	NY	3,081	75	81	26	$27,997
SUNY College at Geneseo	Public	NY	5,153	72	65	31	$17,341
Syracuse University	Private	NY	14,727	72	44	15	$43,111
United States Merchant Marine Academy	Public	NY	1,007	75	25	6	$4,617
Wagner College	Private	NY	1,677	70	71	20	$32,294
Yeshiva University	Private	NY	2,643	71	55	16	$33,953
University of North Carolina School of the Arts	Public	NC	901	72	29	23	$12,579
Miami University-Oxford	Public	OH	16,682	71	80	13	$22,989
The College of Wooster	Private	OH	1,934	75	55	23	$28,209
Lewis & Clark College	Private	OR	1,904	70	72	22	$36,026
University of Portland	Private	OR	3,743	72	77	19	$36,051
Duquesne University	Private	PA	5,732	71	74	20	$30,732
Lebanon Valley College	Private	PA	1,638	73	80	29	$27,459
Messiah College	Private	PA	2,545	75	76	23	$28,867
Saint Joseph’s University	Private	PA	4,222	75	75	15	$35,242
Rhode Island School of Design	Private	RI	2,009	72	26	18	$39,791
Salve Regina University	Private	RI	2,091	73	74	23	$36,646
Rhodes College	Private	TN	1,945	73	45	13	$30,632
The University of the South	Private	TN	1,671	72	67	14	$34,971
Southern Methodist University	Private	TX	6,519	72	47	9	$40,404
Texas Christian University	Private	TX	9,219	71	47	12	$37,509
Gonzaga University	Private	WA	5,123	75	62	15	$36,578
Saint Norbert College	Private	WI	1,962	70	80	24	$26,540