September 2021
The graduation rates of students at US colleges are shockingly low. Less than half of students graduate in 4 years and less than two-thirds graduate within 6 years.
Introduction
In this analysis I look at US college graduation rates from two perspectives. First, I break down the 4-year and 6-year college graduation rates across different institution types for the 2013 entry cohort (the most recent cohort for which data is available). Then, I examine how graduation rates have changed over time.
All data is from the National Center for Education Statistics.
Graduation Rates by Institution Type for the 2013 Entry Cohort
As the first set of graphs below show, only 45% of college students who started in 2013 graduated in 4 years across all institutions (public, private non-profit, and private for-profit). After 6 years, only 63% of students had graduated, a success rate of less than two-thirds. This performance is surprisingly poor and raises serious questions about America's higher education system. Private non-profit colleges outperform, with 56% of their student graduating in 4 years and 68% graduating in 6 years. For-profits lag far behind, at a 26% 6-year graduation rate.
Graduation Rates Over Time By Entry Cohort
The next two graphs show the graduation rates of students who entered college in 1996 through 2013. There is a gradual upward trend over time: the 4-year graduation rate increased from an abysmal 34% in 1996 to 45% in 2013. Likewise, 55% of students who started college in 1996 graduated within 6 years, while that number reached 63% in 2013. This data includes students at all institution types (public, private non-profit, and private for-profit). While the increased graduation rates over time appear to be a positive development, further analysis is required to determine whether improved student performance or lower graduation standards are the main driver. Additionally, the gradual nature of the improvement makes clear that achieving a significant boost to graduation rates must be a long-term effort.
Conclusion
I believe most observers would be stunned to learn that less than half of college students graduate within the intended 4 years. Indeed, to call many schools a "4-year college" is a misnomer based on the data. Significant work clearly remains to bring up graduation rates to satisfactory levels while ensuring that high educational standards are maintained in pursuit of this goal.
I stumbled upon some suprising data on college graduation rates. The data comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, an official US government source.
I thought it would be interesting to make this large table of data easier to understand by visualizing the key metrics in an intuitive way.
To start, I downloaded the raw Excel data from the website.
After saving the data as a Google Sheet, I had to go through and clean up the data. Specifically, I had to transform the hierarchical category labels in the first column into distinct columns. I did this through lots of formulaic manipulation, copy-pasting, and dragging of formatting. This step was key to being able to iterate through the data in a systematic way. Here is the cleaned up data, now ready to analyze.
To create the above charts, I used Tableau Public, the free version of Tableau. The 4-year and 6-year graduation rate charts are each their own sheet in Tableau, as are the time series charts by entry cohort. I combined these charts into the two dashboards you can see on this page. To finalize the Tableau piece, I had to publish the dashboards to their portal.
The last step was to create the page you are reading now on my website and embed the Javascript code for the dashboards.
This was an interesting project because it combined data analysis of a topic that intrigues me with using software tools to make the conclusions easily accessible online.