Which Colleges Benefit from Counting More Graduates?

The official graduation rate that colleges must report to the U.S. Department of Education has included only first-time, full-time students who graduate from that college within 150% of normal time (three years for a two-year college or six years for a four-year college). Although part-time and non-first-time students were included in the federal government’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) collection for the first time this year, it will still be about another year or so before those data will be available to the public. (Russell Poulin at WICHE has a nice summary of what the new IPEDS outcome measure data will mean.)