News stories have proliferated for many years that the United States is losing its global competitiveness because our college graduation rates are slipping.
However, a new report, The Spaces Between Numbers: Getting International Data on Higher Education Straight, finds that, while the proportion of U.S. beginning four-year college students who graduate from the same institution in six years is 56 percent, the proportion who graduate from any institution is 63 percent. That figure is comparable to France’s seven-year rate of 64 percent, the Netherlands’ seven-year rate of 65 percent, or Finland’s 7.5 year combination of 58 percent in universities and 70 percent in their polytechnics. These little known, but significant, facts about our nation’s graduation rates, are not new but are sometimes overlooked, according to an accompanying press release.
As for community colleges, according to the report: "The United States does not compare very favorably with other nations regarding associate’s degrees because our community colleges historically have taken on other missions that comparable institutions and programs in other countries have not assumed."
The report is from the Institute for Higher Education Policy, and is a publication from IHEP’s Global Performance Initiative, which aims to "create a new understanding of the rapidly changing global context for learning and credentialing in higher education, and the potential impact of these changes in the United States." Launched in 2007, the initiative has issued several publications focusing on global higher education through its online information resource center. The Global Performance Initiative is also supported by the Lumina Foundation for Education, an Indianapolis-based private foundation "striving to help people achieve their potential by expanding access to and success in education beyond high school."
So, if the overall report is correct, U.S. graduation rates remain comparable to those of other developed countries. The only major difference—the data most commonly highlighted, but rarely understood—is the categorization of graduation rate data. The United States measures its graduation rates by “institution” while other developed nations measure their attainment rates by “system.”
The report claims that, upon analysis of data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and from other individual countries’ statistical agencies, a majority of OECD countries are producing the equivalent of bachelor’s degrees at roughly the same rate in roughly the same time span.
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