Completing College: A National View of Student Attainment Rates--Fall 2010 Cohort (Signature Report No. 12)

This fifth annual report on national college completion rates offers a look at the six-year outcomes for students who began postsecondary education in fall 2010, toward the end of the Great Recession. It looks at the various pathways students took toward degree completion, as well as the completion rates through May 2016 for the different student types who followed each pathway. The overall national six-year completion rate for the fall 2010 cohort was 54.8 percent, an increase of 1.9 percentage points from the fall 2009 cohort. This counts all first-time students, regardless of institutional sector or enrollment intensity. This rate represents a recovery nearly to the level of the fall 2008 cohort (55.1 percent), but remains more than a percentage point below the high of 56.1 percent for the pre-recession 2007 cohort. The 2010 cohort's higher rate of completion represents about 55,000 more graduates than the fall 2009 cohort, even though both were almost exactly the same size to begin with. A small decrease, less than one percentage point, was observed in the percent of students who were still enrolled in their sixth year without having earned a degree. With more students graduating and fewer still enrolled, the share of students stopping out (no degree and no enrollment in the sixth year) decreased by 1.1 percentage points, from 33.0 percent to 31.9 percent. [For the supplements to this report, "Completing College: A State-Level View of Student Attainment Rates (Signature Report No. 12a)," see ED580303 and "A National View of Student Attainment Rates by Race and Ethnicity--Fall 2010 Cohort (Signature Report No. 12b)," see ED580302.]