Shortly after taking office last year, President Obama announced that “by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world,” thrusting the spotlight on postsecondary accountability. A new report from the American Council on Education, College Graduation Rates: A Look Behind the Numbers, explores the complexities of measuring college graduation rates and finds that existing databases do not give a full picture of student outcomes and success at the postsecondary level.

The report details the most commonly reported graduation rates and the databases used to calculate these rates, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each database. The report also suggests several factors for policy makers to consider before using graduation rate data from existing databases. What this report does not do is focus on disparities in graduation rates, or on how to improve graduation rates, or how to fix graduation rates calculations. Rather, the goal of this report is “to help policy makers better understand the challenges inherent in using current graduation rate data to determine or inform federal or state policy decisions regarding postsecondary education institutions.”

As the President and other policymakers advance their goal of improving postsecondary completion rates, it will be important for them to take into consideration all the caveats and work to capture all of the missing information in the current system.

Tags: accountability, Data, postsecondary, Public Policy

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 13th, 2010 at 8:58 am and is filed under Public Policy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.