Bending the Curve: Institutional Factors Associated with Graduation Rates

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  • Author(s): Juliana de Castro Galvao (ORCID Juliana de Castro Galvao (ORCID 0000-0003-3698-3881); Frederick Tucker (ORCID Frederick Tucker (ORCID 0000-0003-4561-3954); Paul Attewell (ORCID Paul Attewell (ORCID 0000-0003-4578-2416)
  • Language:
    English
  • Source:
    Higher Education Policy. 2024 37(2):278-302.
  • Publication Date:
    2024
  • Document Type:
    Journal Articles
    Reports - Research
  • Additional Information
    • Availability:
      Palgrave Macmillan. Available from: Springer Nature. One New York Plaza, Suite 4600, New York, NY 10004. Tel: 800-777-4643; Tel: 212-460-1500; Fax: 212-460-1700; e-mail:[email protected]; Web site: http://www.palgrave.com/us/social-science/education
    • Peer Reviewed:
      Y
    • Source:
      25
    • Education Level:
      Higher Education
      Postsecondary Education
    • Subject Terms:
      Higher Education; Graduation Rate; Trend Analysis; Educational Trends; Institutional Characteristics; Educational Improvement; Expenditures; Student Characteristics; Prediction; Case Studies; Evaluation Methods; Institutional Evaluation; Selective Admission; Admission Criteria; College Graduates
    • Accession Number:
      10.1057/s41307-023-00304-5
    • ISSN:
      0952-8733
      1740-3863
    • Abstract:
      For decades, educators and policy makers have decried low graduation rates at US colleges, advocating policies and making investments to improve graduation. We analyze a decade of Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) data for four-year colleges to investigate how much institutions have improved their graduation rates from 2008 through 2018, once controlling for institutional and student-body characteristics. We find substantial improvement to graduation rates at public colleges, modest improvement at private not-for-profits, and a decline in graduation at the for-profit sector. We then investigate whether improvements to graduate rates are associated with variation in student-body composition, selectivity, and institutional expenditures, using pooled cross-sectional, Prais-Winsten, and college fixed-effect models. We find that most between-college variation in graduation rates over time reflects variation in the composition of a college's student body and in instructional expenditures. Our Bending the Curve metric utilizes the cross-sectional models to calculate predicted graduation rates for each college and determines how much they exceeded or failed to meet expectations. Unadjusted graduation measures, such as IPEDS' rates that fail to adjust for these compositional factors, are poor indicators of institutional effectiveness and can mislead stakeholders who use them as an indicator of college performance.
    • Abstract:
      As Provided
    • Publication Date:
      2024
    • Accession Number:
      EJ1426464