Undergraduate Degree Earners
Early impacts of the pandemic revealed by undergraduate credential earners during the 2019-20 academic year.
Persistence & Retention
The report is designed to help institutions understand first-year college persistence and retention patterns and identify disparities between different students, institutions, or states in this important early success indicator.
COVID-19: Stay Informed
Recognizing the urgency of COVID-19’s impact on students and institutions, the Research Center’s Stay Informed series tracks outstanding college enrollment trends in near real-time during the COVID-19 era.
Current Term Enrollment Estimates
Overall spring enrollment fell to 16.9 million from 17.5 million, marking a one-year decline of 3.5 percent or 603,000 students, seven times worse than the decline a year earlier.
Persistence and Retention – 2021 Appendix (XLSX)
Persistence and Retention – 2021 Appendix (XLSX) The Persistence and Retention report series examines first-year persistence and retention rates for beginning postsecondary...
Completing College
The Completing College report series provides a comprehensive overview of postsecondary completion trends nationally and by state. For all students who enter postsecondary education for the first time each year, it examines the diverse pathways the student traversed toward completion, as well as a degree or certificate completion rate within six and eight years of enrolling.
Some College, No Degree – 2019
This report offers insights about students’ subsequent enrollments and completions, based on the most current national data that tracks individual students over time and across institutions and across state lines since the first Some College, No Degree report was released in 2014.
Yearly Success and Progress Rates
Year-by-year rates of persistence, transfer, completion, and stop-out can help states and institutions better identify effective intervention points to increase student success.
Tracking Transfer
The 2021 update shows that of those who began postsecondary education at a community college in fall 2014, lower-income students were half as likely as their higher-income peers to have transferred to a four-year institution (24% vs. 40%) and to have attained a bachelor’s degree (10% vs. 21%) within six years of first entry.
COVID-19: Transfer, Mobility, and Progress
On August 31, 2021, the Research Center issued a comprehensive annual report, revealing that American colleges lost nearly 200,000 transfer students in the first full year of the pandemic. Our special journalist’s report, “Bucking the Trend: How Some Institutions Grew Their Transfer Enrollment Amid a Pandemic” offers insights into how some colleges were able to grow their transfer enrollment in 2020-2021 even as numbers were declining nationally.