The College Dropout Problem May Not Be as Bad as the Government Says

Almost 41 percent of students who start college won’t finish, according to the U.S. Department of Education. The data is grim—but it could also be unnecessarily pessimistic. A new report suggests the government may be over-counting dropout rates because it doesn’t account for a big, but hard-to-track, group of students: the ones who transfer midway through college.

For a report (PDF) released on Tuesday, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center looked at state-level data on enrollment and graduation patterns for nearly 2.7 million students who were freshmen in 2008. Its aim was to reveal a flaw in the way the Education Department reports dropout rates. To see whether students graduated, the researchers looked at those who matriculated at a college and then checked to see whether, within six years, they had graduated from that college. That excludes anyone who transfers—almost a quarter of all college students.