Student Persistence: Who's in and Who's Out?

A report from Elia Powers of Inside Higher Ed:

Among the main themes to emerge from meetings of the Education Secretary’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education: whether students — and not just the so-called “traditional” ones — are making sufficient progress toward a degree. A new report from the National Center for Education Statistics, the federal entity that collects data for the Department of Education, provides a first glimpse at what type of progress recent students are making.

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Roughly one-third of the members of the entire cohort had no degree and were no longer enrolled after the three-year period. More than half of students who entered a two-year for-profit had left academe without a degree, compared to 45 percent of students at a two-year public and 40 percent of those at a two-year private nonprofit institution.

“What we’re showing here is that a strong majority of students are retained somewhere, which is very different than what you hear sometimes,” said Lutz Berkner, one of the report’s authors and a senior research associate at MPR Associates, an education research and consulting firm.