Comparing Colleges For Persistence And Completion

Earlier this month, Achieve released a report on the college and career readiness of high school graduates across the United States. Fifty-one state profiles and a K-12 cross-state comparison report provide a snapshot of student performance across a number of indicators and highlighted significant limitations in the availability of data and inconsistencies in data reporting. Today, Achieve has released a second cross-state comparison report that looks at student postsecondary performance – specifically, at high school graduates’ enrollment, persistence, and remediation rates at two- and four-year colleges. The report shows that states report their graduates’ postsecondary outcomes at very different levels of comprehensiveness. While there were a number of challenges in comparing these data across states, the comparisons are nonetheless worth examining and understanding.

Collecting and reporting data to ensure transparency, setting the right expectations, and adopting policy and practices to get better results is a challenge that every state and local policy leader, educator, family, and community should embrace if they seek to make high school graduates college and career ready. We encourage you to take a look at your state’s individual performance profile as well as both comparison reports.

ready for college, careers, and citizenship.