What a Graduation Rate Measures, and Who It Leaves Out

Graduation rate looks like the most straightforward number on a college profile. It is not. It counts one particular group of students, over one particular window, and everyone outside that group is invisible to it.

What the number actually counts

The federal graduation rate is the share of first-time, full-time students who completed their degree at the same college within 150% of the normal time. For a four-year degree that means six years. For a two-year degree, three.

Every word in that definition is doing work, and each one excludes somebody.

Who is left out

Transfer students. A student who starts at one college and finishes at another counts as a non-completer at the first and never enters the cohort at the second. Their degree exists. The statistic does not see it.

Part-time students. Someone working their way through college two courses at a time is not in the cohort at all, however well they do.

Anyone who takes longer. Finish in six years and one semester and you are counted the same as someone who left in week three.

Why this matters most for community colleges

Community colleges are built around exactly the students this measure excludes. Many enrol part-time, many are working, and for a large share the entire point is to transfer to a four-year college afterwards. Transferring is success. The graduation rate records it as failure.

The result is that a community college doing its job well can post a low graduation rate, and the number is not lying so much as answering a question nobody asked.

The same distortion hits any college serving a lot of working adults, parents or part-time students.

How to use it anyway

It is still worth looking at, as long as you read it as what it is.

Compare like with like. A four-year public university against other four-year public universities tells you something. Against a community college it tells you almost nothing. Every rating on this site compares a college only against others of the same type, for this reason.

Read it next to the retention rate. Retention is the share of first-year students who came back for a second year. A college with high retention and a low graduation rate is losing people later, which is a different problem from losing them immediately.

Treat a blank as a blank. Some colleges report no graduation rate. That is missing data, not a zero, and this site shows it as "Not reported" rather than ranking the college last.

What to do with it

• Compare colleges on graduation alongside cost and debt
• See how a college compares with its own peer group
• Read how the ratings work