Time to Degree
October 1, 2026
The Time to Degree report examines how long students take to earn an undergraduate award and how pathways such as dual enrollment, transfer, stopouts, and attendance across multiple institutions shape completion timelines. It includes students earning their first-ever undergraduate credential, as well as those earning their first bachelor’s degree after earning a prior undergraduate award and explores how time to degree patterns vary across demographic groups, institution sector and state.
This report those who earned either their first-ever undergraduate degree (2.33 million) or their bachelor’s degree after earning a prior undergraduate award (488,000) during the 2024-25 academic year. It evaluates time to degree through two measures:
Elapsed time measures the years between a student’s first postsecondary enrollment and degree completion.
Active enrolled time subtracts time spent stopped out from Elapsed Time.
Together, these measures distinguish overall time to completion from time actively enrolled, showing how enrollment interruptions affect students’ paths to a degree.
Below, you can download the full report, explore the data dashboard, and access the data appendix. The dashboard provides national and state-level time to degree data by award type, pathway, student characteristics, and major, while the appendix provides these disaggregated data in Excel format.
Highlights
Time to degree varied widely across students and award type. Median time to first credential was under four years across award types, but many students took much longer, especially when their pathways were less continuous.
- Among the 2.33 million students who earned their first-ever undergraduate degree in 2024-25, median time to degree was 3.7 years for bachelor’s degrees, 3.0 years for associate degrees, and 2.3 years for certificates.
- Although the median time to degree was under 4 years across all award types, the distribution of how long students took to finish their degree varied. Among all bachelor’s degree earners, 13.5 percent of bachelor’s earners finished in seven or more years, as did more than a quarter of associate and certificate earners.
Stopouts were a major driver of longer completion times. Students who stopped out took longer overall and often needed more active enrolled time to earn an award.
- Across all award types, the median elapsed time to degree increased with each additional stopout. Among first-time bachelor’s earners, median time to degree rose from 3.7 years for students with no stopouts to 5.1 years for those with one stopout, 7.3 years for those with two stopouts, and more than 10 years for those with three or more stopouts.
Stopouts helped explain differences across sectors and student groups.
- Demographic time to degree differences were minimal among students who did not stopout. When students did stopout, differences emerged across gender, race and ethnicity, and neighborhood income quintiles.
Complex pathways lengthened time to completion. Education pathways that involved transferring or attending multiple institutions, earning an award prior to finishing a bachelor’s degree, institution or sector changes, and moving across states were associated with longer elapsed and active enrollment times.
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