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Focusing on completion as well as access is key.
The path from enrollment to graduation is neither straight nor certain for many students. If they take longer than planned to reach graduation, it means more time paying for tuition and waiting to start their careers. If they don’t reach graduation at all, they still have to pay for school and are likely left without the skills required to be competitive in today’s economy.
To build a talent-strong Texas, we must focus not only on helping students start their postsecondary journeys but also on helping students complete them.
Most students don’t graduate “on time.”
The charts below show graduation rates for students who started their postsecondary education in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. Students often take longer to complete than the expected two years at a community college and four years at a university.
In the chart for two-year institutions, we see only 20% to 25% of students in each cohort graduated within three years; the percentage grows marginally by four years. The remainder of students either continued at their institution beyond four years, transferred to four-year institutions, or dropped out.
We also see the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on graduation rates. For the 2017 cohort, only 1 in 4 students graduated by 2020, when the pandemic first began. A year later, only a few more students from that cohort graduated, and the three-year graduation rate for the 2018 cohort was down to almost 1 in 5. (The four-year graduation rate for the 2018 cohort is not shown because data from 2022 is not yet available.)
Two-year colleges include different kinds of educational opportunities: community, state, and technical colleges. Three of the five Texas State Technical Colleges campuses have had graduation rates well above 50% during or since the pandemic. There are also several community colleges with graduation rates above 50% during or since the pandemic.
