Imagine a student who starts taking college courses while still in high school through a dual-enrollment program. By the time they arrive on campus as a first-year student, they already have credits completed.
They are the first in their family to attend a four-year institution. Focused. Capable. Working part-time to help support things at home. They make it through their first year. Then their second.
Somewhere along the way, things shift. An unexpected expense. A change in work hours. A delay in financial aid. Nothing dramatic on its own, but enough. They stop out. They plan to come back the next semester.
But then, they don’t.
If you spend time in any enrollment meeting at a college today, you’ll hear the same concerns: fewer students in the pipeline, more competition, the looming demographic cliff. Institutions are scrambling to figure out how to bring more students in. But that’s only part of the story, and not the most urgent one.
More than 43 million Americans have started college and left without a degree. They enrolled. They showed up. And somewhere along the way, they slipped through.
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National completion rates have improved over time, with six-year completion rates now exceeding 60 percent. Yet nearly four out of every ten students who begin college do not complete a degree within six years. In most sectors, a success rate of just over 60 percent would not be considered acceptable; it would be viewed as a warning sign.
Yet we’ve grown accustomed to the idea that a large share of students simply won’t finish. That’s not a reality we should accept. We have normalized incompletion as a structural feature of American higher education, and in doing so, we have made peace with a moral and economic catastrophe.
The 43 million Americans with some college and no credential are not failures. They are living evidence of an infrastructure never designed to see them through. They enrolled during a moment of hope and left during a moment of hardship. Their outcomes reflect systems built for a traditional student population that no longer represents the majority of today’s learners.
We have not rebuilt our systems to serve them.
Higher education systems were largely designed around the full-time, residential 18-year-old entering directly from high school with family financial support. Yet today’s students increasingly balance work, family responsibilities, financial pressures and other obligations alongside their education. Flexibility, rather than conformity to a traditional model, has become essential.
Across the United States, Black and Hispanic students continue to complete bachelor’s degrees at lower rates than their white and Asian peers. These disparities are often linked to differences in financial resources, educational opportunities and the ways students experience institutional environments and support systems. These are not marginal differences. They represent a nearly 30-point completion gap between groups who were promised access to the same credential and the economic mobility it is supposed to provide.
Students who stop out without a credential are frequently worse off economically than if they had never enrolled at all. They often carry debt without realizing the earnings benefits associated with degree completion, and they are significantly more likely to default on student loans.
They enroll for the promise of a better life and too often emerge with a financial burden and no credential to show for it.
In 2012, Georgia State launched GPS Advising, a predictive analytics platform that updates student records nightly and continuously analyzes more than 800 academic and financial risk indicators for each student. Advisers receive real-time alerts and intervene within days, not semesters — allowing them to provide help before students stop out. They also created Panther Retention Grants, proactively identifying students facing modest financial barriers and reaching out with targeted emergency assistance before those students stop out.
The school has demonstrated what is possible when institutions redesign themselves around student completion rather than student sorting. Through these efforts, Georgia State increased the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded annually by approximately 28 percent between 2010 and 2021. Bachelor’s degrees awarded to Black students increased by 57 percent, while bachelor’s degrees awarded to Hispanic students increased by more than 120 percent. Most notably, for several consecutive years, Black, Hispanic, first-generation and low-income students graduated at rates at or above the university average.
Georgia State did not do this by recruiting different students. It did it by building systems that met the students it already had. The students were always capable. The infrastructure was not.
Proactive advising, emergency financial aid that moves fast and data systems that surface who is struggling before they are already gone have made a huge difference.
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Colleges need to develop programs that reflect how students live and work and that hold institutions accountable for whether students finish, not just whether they enroll. Colleges must also reconnect with students who left but are close to finishing. Many are only a course or two away.
The enrollment crisis is real. But the completion crisis is larger, older, quieter and more devastating. We have spent a decade debating the front door of American higher education. It is past time to look at the millions of students who have already walked out, receipts in hand, without the credential they came for.
They needed us to meet them where they were. In too many cases, we did not.
Emmanuel Lalande is senior vice president of enrollment strategy and student success at Columbia College Chicago, is a private, nonprofit school for creatives that offers a curriculum that blends creative and media arts, liberal arts, and business.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
This story about college completion was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
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