Why YOU Should Care About College Graduation Rates

03/16/202405/09/2023 by Michelle Kretzschmar

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When high school students start looking for colleges to apply to, they rarely consider college graduation rates. Even with the sky-rocketing costs of college, most families still don’t consider graduation rates. They may notice it when a school advertises its four-year graduation guarantee but I suspect most just dismiss it as not applying to “their” situation.

But college graduation rates are misleading!

Then you have voices in the media from experts who claim that college graduation rates are misleading. The reasons include:

They don’t actually measure the value of the degree.
They are more of a reflection of a college’s inputs rather than any affect the college may have on the student.
They don’t reflect the fact that an increasing number of students are no longer “traditional” 18 year-olds attending a residential college full-time.

They don’t track transfers in or out of a college.
They don’t account for the variation of the quality and preparation of the students at different colleges and universities.

I’m sure there are reasons I’ve missed and most of them are legitimate concerns in terms of evaluating a college’s ability to graduate students.

Click HERE for list of colleges with at least a 50% graduation rate

It is kind of funny though. I spent my graduate school years looking at high school graduation rates and let me tell you, having poor, academically unprepared students with significant outside distractions didn’t cut the high schools any slack. And most high schools don’t get to pick their students, much less charge them to attend class.

Do you have a traditional college student?

So let me tell you why YOU should care.

First, the YOU I’m talking about is the family that is preparing to send their 18 year-old high school graduate to a full-time college expecting to only pay for four-years of attendance to avoid soul-crushing debt.

That YOU is exactly the YOU that is measured by current college graduation rates.

Unfortunately, the graduation rates commonly reported are the six-year rate for four-year degrees but it’s a start.

Who is responsible for transfers?

For YOU, the argument that the rate doesn’t track transfers is irrelevant. Why? Because transferring, for whatever reason, tends to be an expensive business in that not all courses transfer or that transfer students don’t generally qualify for as much financial aid. (This is not referring to starting off at a community college and transferring to a 4-year institution.)

Of course, there are always mismatches and students will need to transfer through no fault of the college. But if there is such a high number of transfers that it’s affecting the graduation rate, then the college has to take some responsibility since it admitted them.

A colleague of my husband was adjunct faculty at a private college with a low graduation rate. She said that the school explained the low rate was the result of so many of their students being first generation college students and that most who left the college eventually graduated from the local public university.

I’m pretty sure that explanation doesn’t show up in its admissions presentations.

It isn’t as if this school was providing tremendous financial aid for the students. These students were encouraged to take out large loans for a quality, private college education that they never completed but would still have to pay for. The reality is that the school accepted them-it can’t charge them $50,000 a year and then wash its hands of the matter.

Well, actually, they can because that’s exactly what is happening.

Make Meaningful Comparisons

The fact is that schools with similarly situated students will have very dissimilar college graduation rates. That’s not just “interesting” information. That’s information that represents the chances of graduating on-time with a minimum amount of debt. It adds up to real dollars.

It’s one of the reasons why I use the five-year graduation rate for public colleges and the four-year rate for private ones. I figure you can attend an extra year at a public college and still pay less than attending four years at a private school. The cost difference is worth the possibility of a fifth year because of difficulties in getting required classes for graduation. Of course, that also means delaying earning income for a year which should be considered as well.

College Graduation Rates Example

Sometimes it’s easier to demonstrate this point by working backwards from the college graduation rates. The table below lists colleges with a 4-year graduation rate between 70% and 75%. According to IPEDS, there are 63 schools with 500 or more full-time students in this category including 16 public institutions.

Now consider how different they are. The acceptance rates among the schools range from a low of 19% at Rhode Island School of Design to 92% at Transylvania University. The lowest reported 75th% ACT Score was 26 at Concordia College at Moorhead (39% of freshman reporting) while Oberlin College had the highest at 34 (22% of freshman reporting). Among the 35 schools posting their Common Data Set information, the average GPA ranged from 3.27 to 4.34.

The lowest endowment per student was at Binghamton University with only $7,995 while the highest of $436,375 was at Oberlin College. Surprisingly, the University of Washington had the highest Instruction per Student at $32,369. The lowest, $8,459, was at Saint Michael’s College.

If you’re just looking at colleges that spend between $13,000 and $13,999 on Instruction per Student, you’ll find 4-year graduation rates ranging from 15% to 85%. If you consider only colleges that accept 85% of students, the lowest graduation rate was 17%, the highest was 75%.

The point is that college graduation rates can represent real differences between colleges and families should benchmark them just as they would any other data point in their college search.

Ultimately, YOU are planning on graduating from a four-year college. If most of the students don’t, shouldn’t you know why?

Learn More

All of the information in this table is part of the DIY College Rankings Spreadsheet.

Colleges with 4-Year Graduation Rates between 70% and 75%

Name	Type	ST	Full-time Under-grads	4 yr Grad Rate	Admit %	% Freshman Receiving Pell Grants (20-21)	Average Net Price 2020-2021
Hendrix College	Pri	AR	1,101	70	68	28	$9,968
Chapman University	Pri	CA	7,156	72	60	20	$40,451
Loyola Marymount University	Pri	CA	6,945	72	46	10	$40,180
Pepperdine University	Pri	CA	3,427	72	53	21	$40,945
University of California-San Diego	Pub	CA	32,327	73	34	24	$15,632
University of California-Santa Barbara	Pub	CA	22,458	70	29	28	$17,333
University of Connecticut	Pub	CT	17,951	72	56	22	$22,168
University of Delaware	Pub	DE	18,006	73	72	17	$19,122
American University	Pri	DC	8,124	73	64	18	$28,622
Florida State University	Pub	FL	30,153	70	37	25	$12,684
Ringling College of Art and Design	Pri	FL	1,635	71	69	21	$51,318
University of Florida	Pub	FL	31,337	72	30	22	$9,809
University of Miami	Pri	FL	11,535	73	28	14	$34,492
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign	Pub	IL	33,481	71	60	26	$14,272
Butler University	Pri	IN	4,352	75	81	15	$38,643
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology	Pri	IN	2,058	75	77	12	$39,294
Taylor University	Pri	IN	1,670	73	73	16	$26,879
Dordt University	Pri	IA	1,403	71	73	25	$26,662
Drake University	Pri	IA	2,776	70	69	20	$29,507
Transylvania University	Pri	KY	960	70	92	29	$26,271
University of Maryland-College Park	Pub	MD	28,425	72	52	15	$17,146
Washington College	Pri	MD	1,015	74	70	26	$22,088
Clark University	Pri	MA	2,284	75	48	20	$31,565
Hope College	Pri	MI	2,966	73	92	17	$28,688
College of Saint Benedict	Pri	MN	1,533	74	92	24	$28,269
Concordia College at Moorhead	Pri	MN	1,837	71	72	23	$23,890
Gustavus Adolphus College	Pri	MN	2,224	74	73	25	$27,657
Saint Johns University	Pri	MN	1,515	73	89	23	$27,750
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities	Pub	MN	29,074	72	73	18	$17,468
Saint Louis University	Pri	MO	6,647	73	70	19	$30,096
Creighton University	Pri	NE	4,366	70	78	13	$31,040
Saint Anselm College	Pri	NH	1,940	73	78	11	$34,450
University of New Hampshire-Main Campus	Pub	NH	11,232	70	87	21	$22,392
Binghamton University	Pub	NY	13,966	75	44	26	$17,881
Ithaca College	Pri	NY	4,719	72	78	23	$35,327
Marist College	Pri	NY	4,880	75	60	14	$37,868
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute	Pri	NY	5,564	70	53	20	$40,070
Siena College	Pri	NY	3,394	72	83	27	$32,810
Syracuse University	Pri	NY	14,167	72	59	18	$43,545
United States Merchant Marine Academy	Pub	NY	1,006	74	25	9	$4,422
Yeshiva University	Pri	NY	2,536	71	63	11	$36,807
John Carroll University	Pri	OH	2,591	70	88	19	$28,661
Miami University-Oxford	Pub	OH	16,615	73	89	14	$24,616
Oberlin College	Pri	OH	2,905	72	34	8	$44,689
The College of Wooster	Pri	OH	1,947	70	61	23	$24,934
University of Portland	Pri	OR	3,483	74	81	18	$35,535
Elizabethtown College	Pri	PA	1,537	70	79	17	$26,534
Juniata College	Pri	PA	1,222	73	74	24	$26,493
Messiah University	Pri	PA	2,304	73	77	21	$23,895
University of the Sciences	Pri	PA	1,287	71	61	29	$29,948
Washington & Jefferson College	Pri	PA	1,138	71	84	31	$27,101
Rhode Island School of Design	Pri	RI	2,044	70	19	15	$38,234
Salve Regina University	Pri	RI	2,069	71	73	17	$36,708
Wofford College	Pri	SC	1,745	75	52	18	$30,608
The University of the South	Pri	TN	1,724	75	60	19	$29,626
Southern Methodist University	Pri	TX	6,728	75	53	9	$41,986
Texas Christian University	Pri	TX	10,020	71	54	14	$42,574
The University of Texas at Austin	Pub	TX	38,250	70	29	29	$16,589
Saint Michael’s College	Pri	VT	1,395	75	86	22	$28,979
University of Vermont	Pub	VT	10,842	70	64	15	$19,873
Gonzaga University	Pri	WA	4,909	75	76	16	$35,529
University of Washington-Seattle Campus	Pub	WA	29,626	71	53	18	$8,701
Saint Norbert College	Pri	WI	1,905	75	85	17	$27,107