College Completion Dataset

Graduation Rates, Race, Efficiency Measures and More

By Jonathan Ortiz [source]

About this dataset

This College Completion dataset provides an invaluable insight into the success and progress of college students in the United States. It contains graduation rates, race and other data to offer a comprehensive view of college completion in America. The data is sourced from two primary sources – the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)’ Integrated Postsecondary Education System (IPEDS) and Voluntary System of Accountability’s Student Success and Progress rate.

At four-year institutions, the graduation figures come from IPEDS for first-time, full-time degree seeking students at the undergraduate level, who entered college six years earlier at four-year institutions or three years earlier at two-year institutions. Furthermore, colleges report how many students completed their program within 100 percent and 150 percent of normal time which corresponds with graduation within four years or six year respectively. Students reported as being of two or more races are included in totals but not shown separately

When analyzing race and ethnicity data NCES have classified student demographics since 2009 into seven categories; White non-Hispanic; Black non Hispanic; American Indian/ Alaskan native ; Asian/ Pacific Islander ; Unknown race or ethnicity ; Non resident with two new categorize Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander combined with Asian plus students belonging to several races. Also worth noting is that different classifications for graduate data stemming from 2008 could be due to variations in time frame examined & groupings used by particular colleges – those who can’t be identified from National Student Clearinghouse records won’t be subjected to penalty by these locations .

When it comes down to efficiency measures parameters like “Awards per 100 Full Time Undergraduate Students which includes all undergraduate completions reported by a particular institution including associate degrees & certificates less than 4 year programme will assist us here while we also take into consideration measures like expenditure categories , Pell grant percentage , endowment values , average student aid amounts & full time faculty members contributing outstandingly towards instructional research / public service initiatives .

When trying to quantify outcomes back up Median Estimated SAT score metric helps us when it is derived either on 25th percentile basis / 75th percentile basis with all these factors further qualified by identifying required criteria meeting 90% threshold when incoming students are considered for relevance . Last but not least , Average Student Aid equalizes amount granted by institution dividing same over total sum received against what was allotted that particular year .

All this analysis gives an opportunity get a holistic overview about performance , potential deficits &

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How to use the dataset

This dataset contains data on student success, graduation rates, race and gender demographics, an efficiency measure to compare colleges across states and more. It is a great source of information to help you better understand college completion and student success in the United States.

In this guide we’ll explain how to use the data so that you can find out the best colleges for students with certain characteristics or focus on your target completion rate. We’ll also provide some useful tips for getting the most out of this dataset when seeking guidance on which institutions offer the highest graduation rates or have a good reputation for success in terms of completing programs within normal timeframes.

Before getting into specifics about interpreting this dataset, it is important that you understand that each row represents information about a particular institution – such as its state affiliation, level (two-year vs four-year), control (public vs private), name and website. Each column contains various demographic information such as rate of awarding degrees compared to other institutions in its sector; race/ethnicity Makeup; full-time faculty percentage; median SAT score among first-time students; awards/grants comparison versus national average/state average - all applicable depending on institution location — and more!

When using this dataset, our suggestion is that you begin by forming a hypothesis or research question concerning student completion at a given school based upon observable characteristics like financ...

In 2022, about 37.7 percent of the U.S. population who were aged 25 and above had graduated from college or another higher education institution, a slight decline from 37.9 the previous year. However, this is a significant increase from 1960, when only 7.7 percent of the U.S. population had graduated from college. Demographics Educational attainment varies by gender, location, race, and age throughout the United States. Asian-American and Pacific Islanders had the highest level of education, on average, while Massachusetts and the District of Colombia are areas home to the highest rates of residents with a bachelor’s degree or higher. However, education levels are correlated with wealth. While public education is free up until the 12th grade, the cost of university is out of reach for many Americans, making social mobility increasingly difficult. Earnings White Americans with a professional degree earned the most money on average, compared to other educational levels and races. However, regardless of educational attainment, males typically earned far more on average compared to females. Despite the decreasing wage gap over the years in the country, it remains an issue to this day. Not only is there a large wage gap between males and females, but there is also a large income gap linked to race as well.

In an impressive increase from years past, 40.1 percent of women in the United States had completed four years or more of college in 2024. This figure is up from 3.8 percent of women in 1940. A significant increase can also be seen in males, with 37.1 percent of the U.S. male population having completed four years or more of college in 2024, up from 5.5 percent in 1940. 4- and 2-year colleges In the United States, college students are able to choose between attending a 2-year postsecondary program and a 4-year postsecondary program. Generally, attending a 2-year program results in an Associate’s Degree, and 4-year programs result in a Bachelor’s Degree. Many 2-year programs are designed so that attendees can transfer to a college or university offering a 4-year program upon completing their Associate’s. Completion of a 4-year program is the generally accepted standard for entry-level positions when looking for a job. Earnings after college Factors such as gender, degree achieved, and the level of postsecondary education can have an impact on employment and earnings later in life. Some Bachelor’s degrees continue to attract more male students than female, particularly in STEM fields, while liberal arts degrees such as education, languages and literatures, and communication tend to see higher female attendance. All of these factors have an impact on earnings after college, and despite nearly the same rate of attendance within the American population between males and females, men with a Bachelor’s Degree continue to have higher weekly earnings on average than their female counterparts.

School enrollment data are used to assess the socioeconomic condition of school-age children. Government agencies also require these data for funding allocations and program planning and implementation.

Data on school enrollment and grade or level attending were derived from answers to Question 10 in the 2015 American Community Survey (ACS). People were classified as enrolled in school if they were attending a public or private school or college at any time during the 3 months prior to the time of interview. The question included instructions to “include only nursery or preschool, kindergarten, elementary school, home school, and schooling which leads to a high school diploma, or a college degree.” Respondents who did not answer the enrollment question were assigned the enrollment status and type of school of a person with the same age, sex, race, and Hispanic or Latino origin whose residence was in the same or nearby area.

School enrollment is only recorded if the schooling advances a person toward an elementary school certificate, a high school diploma, or a college, university, or professional school (such as law or medicine) degree. Tutoring or correspondence schools are included if credit can be obtained from a public or private school or college. People enrolled in “vocational, technical, or business school” such as post secondary vocational, trade, hospital school, and on job training were not reported as enrolled in school. Field interviewers were instructed to classify individuals who were home schooled as enrolled in private school. The guide sent out with the mail questionnaire includes instructions for how to classify home schoolers.

Enrolled in Public and Private School – Includes people who attended school in the reference period and indicated they were enrolled by marking one of the questionnaire categories for “public school, public college,” or “private school, private college, home school.” The instruction guide defines a public school as “any school or college controlled and supported primarily by a local, county, state, or federal government.” Private schools are defined as schools supported and controlled primarily by religious organizations or other private groups. Home schools are defined as “parental-guided education outside of public or private school for grades 1-12.” Respondents who marked both the “public” and “private” boxes are edited to the first entry, “public.”

Grade in Which Enrolled – From 1999-2007, in the ACS, people reported to be enrolled in “public school, public college” or “private school, private college” were classified by grade or level according to responses to Question 10b, “What grade or level was this person attending?” Seven levels were identified: “nursery school, preschool;” “kindergarten;” elementary “grade 1 to grade 4” or “grade 5 to grade 8;” high school “grade 9 to grade 12;” “college undergraduate years (freshman to senior);” and “graduate or professional school (for example: medical, dental, or law school).”

In 2008, the school enrollment questions had several changes. “Home school” was explicitly included in the “private school, private college” category. For question 10b the categories changed to the following “Nursery school, preschool,” “Kindergarten,” “Grade 1 through grade 12,” “College undergraduate years (freshman to senior),” “Graduate or professional school beyond a bachelor’s degree (for example: MA or PhD program, or medical or law school).” The survey question allowed a write-in for the grades enrolled from 1-12.

Question/Concept History – Since 1999, the ACS enrollment status question (Question 10a) refers to “regular school or college,” while the 1996-1998 ACS did not restrict reporting to “regular” school, and contained an additional category for the “vocational, technical or business school.” The 1996-1998 ACS used the educational attainment question to estimate level of enrollment for those reported to be enrolled in school, and had a single year write-in for the attainment of grades 1 through 11. Grade levels estimated using the attainment question were not consistent with other estimates, so a new question specifically asking grade or level of enrollment was added starting with the 1999 ACS questionnaire.

Limitation of the Data – Beginning in 2006, the population universe in the ACS includes people living in group quarters. Data users may see slight differences in levels of school enrollment in any given geographic area due to the inclusion of this population. The extent of this difference, if any, depends on the type of group quarters present and whether the group quarters population makes up a large proportion of the total population. For example, in areas that are home to several colleges and universities, the percent of individuals 18 to 24 who were enrolled in college or graduate school would increase, as people living in college dormitories are now included in the universe.

We know that students at elite universities tend to be from high-income families, and that graduates are more likely to end up in high-status or high-income jobs. But very little public data has been available on university admissions practices. This dataset, collected by Opportunity Insights, gives extensive detail on college application and admission rates for 139 colleges and universities across the United States, including data on the incomes of students. How do admissions practices vary by institution, and are wealthy students overrepresented?

Motivation

Education equality is one of the most contested topics in society today. It can be defined and explored in many ways, from accessible education to disabled/low-income/rural students to the cross-generational influence of doctorate degrees and tenure track positions. One aspect of equality is the institutions students attend. Consider the “Ivy Plus” universities, which are all eight Ivy League schools plus MIT, Stanford, Duke, and Chicago. Although less than half of one percent of Americans attend Ivy-Plus colleges, they account for more than 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs, a quarter of U.S. Senators, half of all Rhodes scholars, and three-fourths of Supreme Court justices appointed in the last half-century.

A 2023 study (Chetty et al, 2023) tried to understand how these elite institutions affect educational equality:

Do highly selective private colleges amplify the persistence of privilege across generations by taking students from high-income families and helping them obtain high-status, high-paying leadership positions? Conversely, to what extent could such colleges diversify the socioeconomic backgrounds of society’s leaders by changing their admissions policies?

To answer these questions, they assembled a dataset documenting the admission and attendance rate for 13 different income bins for 139 selective universities around the country. They were able to access and link not only student SAT/ACT scores and high school grades, but also parents’ income through their tax records, students’ post-college graduate school enrollment or employment (including earnings, employers, and occupations), and also for some selected colleges, their internal admission ratings for each student. This dataset covers students in the entering classes of 2010–2015, or roughly 2.4 million domestic students.

They found that children from families in the top 1% (by income) are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores, and two-thirds of this gap can be attributed to higher admission rates with similar scores, with the remaining third due to the differences in rates of application and matriculation (enrollment conditional on admission). This is not a shocking conclusion, but we can further explore elite college admissions by socioeconomic status to understand the differences between elite private colleges and public flagships admission practices, and to reflect on the privilege we have here and to envision what a fairer higher education system could look like.

Data

The data has been aggregated by university and by parental income level, grouped into 13 income brackets. The income brackets are grouped by percentile relative to the US national income distribution, so for instance the 75.0 bin represents parents whose incomes are between the 70th and 80th percentile. The top two bins overlap: the 99.4 bin represents parents between the 99 and 99.9th percentiles, while the 99.5 bin represents parents in the top 1%.

Each row represents students’ admission and matriculation outcomes from one income bracket at a given university. There are 139 colleges covered in this dataset.

The variables include an array of different college-level-income-binned estimates for things including attendance rate (both raw and reweighted by SAT/ACT scores), application rate, and relative attendance rate conditional on application, also with respect to specific test score bands for each college and in/out-of state. Colleges are categorized into six tiers: Ivy Plus, other elite schools (public and private), highly selective public/private, and selective public/private, with selectivity generally in descending order. It also notes whether a college is public and/or flagship, where “flagship” means public flagship universities. Furthermore, they also report the relative application rate for each income bin within specific test bands, which are 50-point bands that had the most attendees in each school tier/category.

Several values are reported in “test-score-reweighted” form. These values control for SAT score: they are calculated separately for each SAT score value, then averaged with weights based on the distribution of SAT scores at the institution.

Note that since private schools typically don’t differentiate between in-...

There were approximately 18.58 million college students in the U.S. in 2022, with around 13.49 million enrolled in public colleges and a further 5.09 million students enrolled in private colleges. The figures are projected to remain relatively constant over the next few years.

What is the most expensive college in the U.S.? The overall number of higher education institutions in the U.S. totals around 4,000, and California is the state with the most. One important factor that students – and their parents – must consider before choosing a college is cost. With annual expenses totaling almost 78,000 U.S. dollars, Harvey Mudd College in California was the most expensive college for the 2021-2022 academic year. There are three major costs of college: tuition, room, and board. The difference in on-campus and off-campus accommodation costs is often negligible, but they can change greatly depending on the college town.

The differences between public and private colleges Public colleges, also called state colleges, are mostly funded by state governments. Private colleges, on the other hand, are not funded by the government but by private donors and endowments. Typically, private institutions are  much more expensive. Public colleges tend to offer different tuition fees for students based on whether they live in-state or out-of-state, while private colleges have the same tuition cost for every student.

This map shows the percent of adults (25+) who have completed some college, but do not hold a degree - ideal places to implement college completion programs. For example, Texas implemented a state-wide program called GradTX aimed at helping stop-outs finish what they started. Other states such as Colorado and Florida have reverse transfer programs. An all-too common situation is that students take enough credits to successfully transfer from a 2-year college to a 4-year college, but do not attain an associate degree. Life happens and these transfer students do not graduate from the 4-year college, however, they have completed an additional semester or more of college credits. Reverse transfer programs allow these students to transfer these credits earned at the 4-year college back to the 2-year college in order to receive an associate degree. This map uses these hosted feature layers containing the most recent American Community Survey data. These layers are part of the ArcGIS Living Atlas, and are updated every year when the American Community Survey releases new estimates, so values in the map always reflect the newest data available.

This folder contains data behind the story Marriage Isn’t Dead — Yet.

"There’s no question Americans are getting married later in life. But most still get married eventually, or at least they have so far. More than 70 percent of Americans have been married at least once by age 35, down from more than 90 percent 30 years ago but still a solid majority.3 Moreover, most of the trends in marriage have been fairly steady. So it’s probably reasonable to assume that today’s 25- to 34-year-olds will follow the same general path as those a decade older. Focusing on those two age groups reveals some interesting patterns.

The chart below shows the marriage rate,4 broken down by education. For Americans ages 25 to 34, the rate has fallen faster for less-educated men than for those with a college degree, but there is a clear downward trend for all groups that has accelerated since about 2005.

For people a decade older, however, the story is significantly different. The decline is much steeper among the less educated. Among college graduates, in fact, marriage rates have hardly fallen at all since 2000, and are only modestly lower than they were in 1980.5" - Excerpt from the article provided above.

The data was obtained from the FiveThirtyEight collection of datasets.