25 Years Into the College Completion Movement: What We Did Right, and What We Should Do Next

Roughly 25 years ago, philanthropies, policymakers and reform organizations coalesced around a shared goal: increasing college completion across the United States. At the time, the problems were clear. Too many students enrolled in college but left without a degree, and some groups—including those from low-income backgrounds—were substantially less likely to complete than others.

Much of what followed was thoughtful, data-informed and motivated by a genuine commitment to students. Researchers generated credible evidence about what helped students remain in college and graduate. Institutions experimented, learned and adapted. Higher education systems, state policymakers and governors built better data systems, enacted new policies and changed financial incentives.

Progress followed. Nationally, degree attainment increased meaningfully in the last 25 years. While progress varied by college and student population, since 2002, community colleges increased completion rates by 12 percentage points and four-year colleges and universities achieved a seven-percentage-point gain.

These gains flowed from scaled changes in a range of institutional practices: developmental education reform that accelerated entry into credit-bearing coursework, improved advising that helped students earn more credits and remain enrolled, clearer program maps that reduced confusion and excess courses, greater nonacademic supports to meet students’ basic needs (which had long been viewed as falling outside a college’s responsibility), and more.

Taken together, these reforms not only improved graduation rates but demonstrated something important: Colleges can change, and when they do, student outcomes can improve. The college completion movement helped establish that foundation—and it deserves credit for doing so.

And yet, 25 years in, the completion movement deserves a grade of incomplete, because the outcomes that matter most remain profoundly stratified. The chances of obtaining a bachelor’s degree—now required for more good jobs than ever before—are roughly three times as high for students from families in the top income quartile (59 percent of whom earn a bachelor’s degree) as for those from the bottom half of the income distribution (only about 20 percent).

Moreover, many community college credentials (and a smaller number of bachelor’s degrees) have failed to prepare graduates for either immediate entry into jobs with sustaining wages or subsequent degrees needed to secure such jobs. Meanwhile, good jobs are going unfilled due to misalignment of college credentials with evolving career opportunities.

The problem is that many reform strategies rested on the assumption that raising completion rates would advance student outcomes and societal interests—but didn’t do enough to ensure that all students who earned degrees were able to earn a decent living or that their degrees would meet employer needs. If the next phase of reform is to deliver on the promise of the last 25 years, that assumption needs to be revisited.

Main Ways the Completion Movement Fell Short

1. Completion became the north star—rather than a means to talent development and economic mobility.

Because completion is correlated with better outcomes on average, the field set a goal of improving completion of any credential—including bachelor’s and associate degrees (no matter the major) and certificates. That simplification helped with messaging and measurement, and it provided an organizing principle for interventions that were replicated and led to improved graduation rates.

But, over time, treating completion as an end obscured an important distinction: Not all credentials lead directly to good jobs or to further degrees that are needed to secure those jobs. Here’s what the research tells us:

• At about a quarter of U.S. colleges and universities, the typical graduate earns less than $32,000 a year, the average wage for those who only completed a high school credential.
• Half of community college credentials also fail to deliver adequate value, failing to directly lead to good jobs or the bachelor’s degrees that open the door to good jobs.
• Outcomes vary dramatically by field of study, credential level and institution.

Our national focus on aggregate completion rates hid the variation among credentials and programs of study. In some cases, efforts to push students across the finish line produced completions that failed to improve their economic or educational prospects.

2. We failed to design completion reforms where multiple degrees are needed.

Perhaps the most consequential oversight of the completion movement was its failure to grapple seriously with the fact that many degrees that colleges worked to help students complete don’t have independent value. Rather, their value emerges in combination with other degrees, almost always conferred by a different institution.

Some of these challenges come from the four-year sector. For example, data shows that students graduating with bachelor’s degrees in counseling psychology often fail to land sustainable-wage jobs, in part because many good jobs available for students in that discipline also require a graduate degree. The same is likely true for many students completing bachelor’s degrees in biology.

Psychology and biology are among the most popular majors for baccalaureate earners, and it is unclear how many of the hundreds of thousands of students completing these degrees every year understand the need for—or can afford—additional education beyond the four-year degree when they select these programs of study.

The challenges are even greater for students who start at a community college. We have long known that completion of a transfer-oriented associate degree at a community college has little labor market value on its own. This makes sense: These degrees were not designed to help students enter jobs but rather to complete the first two years of a bachelor’s. This does not mean that graduating from community college with such an associate degree is inconsequential—research shows that bachelor’s attainment rates are much higher for transfer students who first complete an associate degree than for those who transfer without one. But it does mean that students who complete a transfer-oriented degree should be seen as finishing an important interim step—not the ultimate goal.

And yet, completion reforms within community colleges treated associate degree attainment as the ultimate outcome. Community colleges were rewarded for increasing completion of transfer-oriented associate degrees without a commensurate focus on whether students successfully transferred to a four-year institution or actually earned a bachelor’s degree. With attainment of a general studies degree as an acceptable goal, many community colleges allowed students to spend multiple years taking sets of courses unaligned to a four-year major, even though research shows students are more successful in attaining bachelor’s degrees when they choose a program in a specific discipline earlier in their college tenure.

And many four-year institutions that accept significant numbers of community college transfers take too many who have not yet completed an associate degree even though, as mentioned above, research points to much better bachelor’s attainment outcomes for students who complete an associate degree before transferring.

Toward a More Effective Reform Agenda Focused on Value

By treating completion rather than economic mobility as the goal, reform efforts to date have stopped one step too soon. The next phase of reform must start with the end in mind. If the goal is economic mobility and talent development, then completion of any degree cannot be the ultimate goal—it must be completion of credentials of value. For this to change, four shifts will be especially important.

1. Make completion of credentials of value the explicit goal—everywhere.

Today, the terms “credentials of value” or “degrees of value” are often spoken without adequate definition. If the field is to coalesce and organize reforms around this new goal, credentials of value must be clearly defined and understood.

While there are many ways to assess the value of a college credential that matter, two must be central: whether credentials lead to (1) a good job with family-sustaining wages or (2) success in subsequent higher education that enables access to those jobs. These outcomes are essential not only because they are measurable, but because economic security and educational progression shape people’s ability to exercise choice, participate fully in society and pursue broader forms of well-being.

Other important dimensions of value—such as health, civic engagement and lifelong learning—should not be discounted. But rather than standing in opposition to labor market and educational outcomes, they often overlap with them. The knowledge, skills and habits that enable graduates to succeed in the workforce and in further education—critical thinking, ethical behavior, communication and persistence—are many of the same capacities that support human flourishing more broadly. Centering value on employment and educational progression, therefore, does not narrow the mission of higher education.

Consistently referencing this definition of value will be needed if college administrators, staff and faculty are to come to understand that the number of degrees and the time students take to complete them is not the only goal for colleges—meaningful advancements in economic mobility for students matter, too. It also sends a signal to governors, legislatures and system leaders that colleges are a necessary investment because the talent needed for states, employers and communities to thrive will be developed through value-focused reform.

2. Design program reforms by starting with the labor market and working backward.

Too many institutional improvement efforts start with existing programs and ask how to increase completion within them. A value-centered approach starts by asking, what are the good jobs in this region (or in a broader area for colleges with national or statewide scope)? What credentials—and sequences of credentials—lead to those jobs? And how well do current programs—and partnerships—perform against that standard?

From there, institutions can classify programs by value or return on investment and make deliberate choices about where to invest, redesign or redirect resources. The goal is not uniformity, but intentionality.

The Aspen Institute and the Community College Research Center have outlined how community colleges can do this work through the Unlocking Opportunity project, which has yielded program classification and improvement guidance for other colleges. When 10 colleges started this work three years ago, what they learned about students’ postgraduation success was often troubling. But the findings inspired them to make strategic changes. For example, colleges identified huge numbers of qualified students in prenursing programs who had no chance of getting into the nursing programs themselves because programs were too small. The result: Many of them failed to earn any credential that would lead to a job or successful transfer. In response, college leaders looked for ways to expand nursing programs and created new degree programs to prepare students for other in-demand, high-paying health-care jobs.

College teams also found large numbers of students in general studies associate degree programs, which led to very low rates of transfer and bachelor’s attainment, and low-wage jobs for students who didn’t transfer or complete a bachelor’s degree. So, they reinvented advising systems to ensure that many more students entered premajor programs tied to clear four-year degree maps.

To date, this work has focused on community colleges. Four-year colleges need to engage in similar, program-level reform if higher education is to deliver on its promise. One example other four-year institutions can look to is the University of North Texas. There, college leaders assessed the value of different programs based on the amount of time it would take for students to repay the net cost of a completed bachelor’s degree. Using an average of six years, the college then set a goal of shortening “time to value” for all programs in which graduates needed more than six years to earn enough to recoup their costs.

3. Align policy and funding with ultimate outcomes—not short-term metrics.

Too many policies and funding models reward intermediate outcomes—enrollment, retention or credential completion—without regard to what happens next. A more effective approach would align incentives with students’ ultimate success, including:

• Employment and earnings outcomes
• Success in attaining subsequent higher education credentials

This alignment is especially important for students who start at community college and seek to transfer. If economic mobility and talent development are the goals, then bachelor’s degree attainment must be treated as the completion outcome for community college students who begin on a transfer pathway. That in turn requires shared accountability at the community college and four-year levels. In practical terms, this means:

• Completion metrics should follow students across institutions and count the bachelor’s degree—not the associate degree—as the primary outcome for transfer-oriented students.
• States and systems should hold (1) four-year colleges and universities accountable for enrolling and graduating their fair share of community college transfer students, and (2) community colleges accountable for graduating more students who successfully transfer with junior year standing in a major.
• Funding and accountability systems should reflect shared responsibility across sectors, rather than placing the burden of completion for students who start in community college almost entirely on community colleges themselves.

One additional implication is critical: Timelines for accountability must be long enough to reflect when value accrues. Some high-value pathways require multiple credentials over time—an associate degree, followed by a bachelor’s degree and (in some fields) a graduate credential. Measuring success too early risks driving colleges away from enrolling students in credentials that will require more time for value to emerge. Do we really want to depress completion of medical degrees, master’s degrees in teaching and doctorates in environmental science simply because they require more years of education than a bachelor’s in electrical engineering?

At the same time, some pathways do take too long and cost too much. Colleges ought to have incentives to hold down costs by shortening time to degree or obtaining investments from governments or employers to support completion. For example, some degree programs—especially in high-demand fields like engineering—are structured in ways that require that students complete well over 120 credits in prerequisite and degree courses. This increases costs by pushing students into a fifth year without clear evidence of added value.

4. Build data systems that track what happens after college.

Currently, federal student data does not adequately capture either employment and wages for most graduates or the success of students in subsequent degree programs (including bachelor’s attainment for students who start in community college). Those data are available in some but not all states, and usually only for students who remain in the same state after graduating.

Federal, state and system data systems must be modernized to track postgraduation outcomes, including:

• Employment and earnings
• Transfer and bachelor’s attainment
• Success in subsequent higher education more broadly

Doing this well requires both technical and political change. At the federal level, it means reversing the ban on a federal student unit record system and enabling secure, privacy-protected access to earnings data through a partnership with the Internal Revenue Service. At the state and system level, it means integrating K–12, higher education and workforce data so outcomes can be tracked over time, across institutions and into the labor markets.

Conclusion

It would be unfortunate if the move to a credentials-of-value agenda diminished the urgency of continuing to improve completion, which continues to be a predictor of student success after graduation. But it will become an even stronger predictor of student success if it is coupled with efforts to strengthen programs of study and student advising so more students enter and complete programs that set them up to succeed in the workforce or further academic study.

The next phase of reform must build on the completion gains already realized with new sets of goals and approaches, shifting from undifferentiated completion of degrees to completion of programs of value—and moving from siloed accountability for students’ completion and postgraduate success to shared responsibility within institutions and across sectors. If we can get it right, the next 25 years of reform may more fully deliver on the promise that inspired the first.