In spite of being a key marker of colleges’ commitments to socioeconomic diversity, it has only recently been possible to see institution-level graduation rates of students who begin college with Pell Grants. I wrote a piece for Brookings in late 2017 based on the first data release from the U.S. Department of Education and later posted a spreadsheet of graduation rates upon the request of readers—highlighting public interest in the metric.
ED released the second year of data late last year, and Melissa Korn of The Wall Street Journal (one of the best education writers in the business) reached out to me to see if I had those data handy for a piece she wanted to write on Pell graduation rate gaps. Since I do my best to keep up with new data releases from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, I was able to send her a file and share my thoughts on the meaning of the data. This turned into a great piece on completion gaps at selective colleges.
Since I have already gotten requests to share the underlying data in the WSJ piece, I am happy to post the spreadsheet again on my site.
Download the spreadsheet here!
A few cautions:
(1) There are likely a few colleges that screwed up data reporting to ED. For example, gaps of 50% for larger colleges are likely an error, but nobody at the college caught them.
(2) Beware the rates for small colleges (with fewer than 50 students in a cohort).
(3) This graduation rate measure is the graduation rate for first-time, full-time students who complete a bachelor’s degree at the same institution within six years. It excludes part-time and transfer students, so global completion numbers will be higher.
(4) As my last post highlighted, there are some legitimate concerns with using percent Pell as an accountability measure. However, it’s the best measure that is currently available.
Robert Kelchen 