The six-year completion rate for undergraduates who started college in 2016 reached 62.3%, the highest level this decade but only 0.1 percentage point above the previous year’s cohort, according to a new report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The flat figure comes after the completion rate last year jumped 1.2 percentage points from the 2014 cohort to the 2015 cohort.

Like community colleges nationally, more than half (56%) of Nashville State Community College’s student body enroll part-time. Part-time students face different financial, social and academic challenges than traditional students. Colleges face unique challenges engaging part-time students to help them persist and succeed to degree completion.

With Indiana’s college-going rate of just 53% — the lowest in recent history, Ivy Tech Community College is piloting a new program to keep students on campus by making sure they have 10 specific habits. The program — called Ivy Achieves – aims to ensure that once students go to college, they complete their degrees. 

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, community colleges have faced unprecedented enrollment declines. These declines have been so large that community colleges across the country have implemented innovative reforms to try and bring students back to campus. But new data from the National Student Clearinghouse show that enrollment woes are not the only problem facing community colleges.

Milwaukee has lots of nonprofits and educational institutions working to help students go to and stay in college. But the city still faces a college completion “crisis.” Only about two in three Milwaukee students graduate from high school; of that group, just 36 percent enrolled in college in 2020.

There’s good news and bad in a new report on college student success rates. While many U.S. colleges are improving graduation rates for full-time students, achievement gaps continue to exist for Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic students, students 25 and older, and part-time students. How do we help them succeed?

Many Black students in the United States face distinctive challenges when it comes to completing postsecondary programs. Barriers to completion include the high financial cost of higher education and implicit and overt forms of racial discrimination that cause many to stop out or never enroll in the first place.

As vice president of student success and engagement, Price shares his student success philosophy, including the importance of nurturing hope.