Getting a handle on the extent of the dropout problem in American colleges and universities is tricky. Individual institutions regularly publish figures on how many of their first-year students eventually obtain degrees, and such data can be aggregated. A recent report by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) concluded that only 55 percent of bachelor’s degree seekers who embarked on their studies at a four-year institution in 1995-96 graduated from that institution within six years.
“Students are increasingly packaging credits from various places and then finding an institution that will give them a credential,” said Peter Ewell, vice president of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems (NCHEMS). “Some students even enroll in multiple institutions at the same time.”
Ewell and his colleagues at NCHEMS are investigating methods that would enable institutions and states to share more specific data on students’ enrollment and dropout decisions. He and other researchers, who have long cited the need for a more comprehensive way to assess students’ progress, say such data sharing would provide a fuller, more accurate picture of student transfer and attainment rates.
Even without that comprehensive system, however, it’s clear that today’s students are on the move. U.S. Department of Education analyst Clifford Adelman calculated that the proportion of undergraduates who attend more than one institution during their college careers has now surpassed 60 percent — up from 40 percent in 1970 — and that only three of every five such undergraduates complete degrees. NCES estimates that 23 percent of the bachelor’s degree candidates who began studies in 1995-1996 transferred to other institutions, while 13 percent left higher education altogether. Thus the overall bachelor’s degree attainment rate would most likely be much higher than the initial estimate of 55 percent.
A more promising way to estimate retention and dropout rates is to use longitudinal research that follows particular cohorts of students and gathers information on their progress through postsecondary education and into the labor force. This is exactly what NCES has done with its Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (BPS), which identified 10,600 first-year students in 1989 and collected data on them in 1992 and 1994. A second cohort was identified in 1996. The study calculated that 63 percent of bachelor’s degree seekers in the most recent cohort had graduated from that or another institution within six years.
