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Retention/Graduation Questions and Answers

Degree Attainment Rates at Colleges and University January 2005 study available from the Higher Education Research Institute. [More] NCAA Report on the Federal Graduation Rates Data 2005 reports for Division I, II, and III schools, including UC Santa Cruz. [More]

How do we interpret UCSC's six-year graduation rate?

The fundamental interpretive principle is the higher the better.  In general, institutions with more selective admissions have higher retention and graduation rates, and privates tend to do better than publics.

External benchmarks
To make a judgment about how well UCSC does at graduating the students who enroll, we need to compare them to reasonable benchmarks.  Depending on the comparison we choose, UCSC’s 6-year graduation rate looks better or worse.

As the table below indicates, UCSC’s 6-year graduation rates were better than the average rates of 262 baccalaureate granting institutions used in a study of graduation rates conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, or of all NCAA Division I institutions by 8 and 9 percentage points respectively.  On-the-other-hand UCSC’s most recent 6-year graduation rate was 10% below the UC average.

National comparisons inevitably include colleges and universities across a range of institutional characteristics and levels of selectivity.  Realistically, the UC average is the most relevant external benchmark.  The table below compares the retention and graduation statistics of the 1999 cohort of UCSC freshmen to the UC systemwide average (which includes UCSC students).

UCSC performs below the UC average across all measures.  As the two graphs below indicate, the difference in 6-year graduation rates is in large part the result of UCSC’s lower 1- and 2-year retention rates.  As noted in the previous question though, UCSC retention rates are increasing, and the gap between UCSC and the UC average has gotten smaller over the last few years.

Click on image for larger version of UC Santa Cruz cohort.

Click on image for larger version UC cohort.

Note: All UCSC retention and graduation rates, and the UC average 1-, 2-, and 3-year retention, and 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-year graduation rates are based on actual data. The UC average 4-, 5-, and 6-year retained but not yet graduated statistics are inferred.

Institutional benchmarks
A considerable amount of the variability in institutional graduation rates is attributable to the characteristics of an institution’s student body, both in terms of demographics and academic preparation.  In a national study of graduation rates at 262 four-year institutions, the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA identified the student characteristics most predictive of graduating.  Using data from that study, Institutional Research was able to create predicted 6-year graduation rates for UCSC based on the gender, ethnicity, SAT scores, and high school GPA of UCSC students.

As indicated in the table above, the 1994 through 1998 cohorts of UCSC students graduated at about or slightly above the predicted rates given their incoming characteristics.  Another way of thinking about the data is that UCSC did no better or worse at graduating it’s students than might be expected of any institution that had a similar student body.  Of course it is possible to do better than average, and the difference between actual and predicted rates are quite different for different subpopulations of students at UCSC.  (See the answer to the next question.)

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