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.
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 exactly 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 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
- Why You Should Pay More Attention to College Graduation Rates Rather Than Retention Rates
- Essential Guide to College Graduation Rates
- Are college grad rates “bad data?”
- And what about graduation rates?
- What’s wrong with looking at graduation rates?
- Talking About College Graduation Rates
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-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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