Report: Closing the College Graduation Gap

Posted by National College Access Network on November 13, 2018

Students who receive services from NCAN member organizations enroll in and complete postsecondary education at rates far exceeding their peers. But more work remains to close persistent gaps between low-income and first-generation students’ postsecondary completion outcomes and those of all students nationally.

These are the key findings from NCAN’s just-released report: “Closing the College Graduation Gap: 2018 National College Access and Success Benchmarking Report.” The report also identifies a leak in the completion pipeline for member-served students in years 4 through 6 following high school graduation that contributes to the persistent completion gap.

The report is the fifth in a series from the Benchmarking Project, a collaborative effort between NCAN and its members that derives enrollment, persistence, and completion rate benchmarks of students served by college access and success organizations and measures these against comparable national rates for all students.

The fifth round of data collection saw 69 NCAN members submit data on over 108,000 students from the high school classes of 2011 and 2016 through the National Student Clearinghouse’s StudentTracker for Outreach service. The National Student Clearinghouse finds outcomes data on these students in its extensive database of postsecondary outcomes of students nationwide and returns the results to NCAN for analysis. After five rounds of the project, NCAN now has data from over half a million students served by NCAN members.

Read more: http://www.collegeaccess.org/BlogItem?dg=184c5bfd72fd4dfda73f08ae19d1fbf1