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For policy wonks in higher education, there’s a national statistic that’s often looked at to see how well colleges are serving students: the six-year graduation rate.

It’s kind of an odd metric, considering it measures completion rates of degrees that are supposed to take four years. But the idea of the metric is to answer what percentage of students who started a four-year program six years ago have actually earned the degree.

Yesterday the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center unveiled the latest answers, both for the national level and for each of the 50 states. 

The result: For the third year in a row, the national six-year graduation rate has stalled at 62.2 percent. 

Prior to the pandemic, this metric had improved for five years in a row. But these days it seems stuck in place, at least in aggregate.

But an article in Diverse Issues in Higher Education noted a troubling fact as it dug into the data. When looking at not just the six-year graduation rate but the eight-year graduation rate in recent years, it seems that more students are simply walking away from college, rather than just taking longer to finish.

Of the 2.4 million students who started college in 2017, 710,000 students are no longer enrolled anywhere, a researcher from the clearinghouse told the magazine.

Some states did see upticks in six-year graduation rates, including Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan and Virginia. But the rate is down in Florida, Georgia, New York and Massachusetts, among others. 

One question is whether the growing public skepticism of higher education is driving more students away from finishing their degrees, even as new projections show that employer demand for applicants with degrees is expected to continue to grow.

👂EAR TO THE GROUND

DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS: Microaggressions are subtle, causal, everyday assaults, indignities and invalidations that people of color experience. As a new EdSurge Research article explores, this often-unintentional racism occurs regularly in schools. How do teachers respond when students, colleagues and parents ask them questions like, “Where are you really from?” or “What are you?” And what happens when those teachers push back? Read the results of our study here.   

✍️ COLUMNIST CORNER

RESPECTFULLY, I DISAGREE: In May, Evi Wusk asked her students what they’d remember about her English class. “I will remember how we would disagree, but we were still very respectful,” one shared. Wusk attributes her students’ ability to respectfully disagree to Spider Web Discussions, a strategy she taught to her high schoolers and that she’s now using in her new role as a professor for pre-service teachers. 

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🎧 ON THE PODCAST

PUSH BY TEACHER ED PROGRAMS: Schools of education are working harder at recruiting these days, in response to enrollment declines. Can more people — and more people from a variety of backgrounds — be convinced to join the teaching profession in this particularly trying time? 

📈 STAT-O-MATIC

40 percent

The share of students at public, two-year institutions who were enrolled entirely online in the 2021-22 academic year, according to data analysis by the firm Phil Hill & Associates. (Inside Higher Ed) 

💼 BYTE-SIZE BRIEFS

He wanted privacy. His college gave him none. (The Markup)

College leaders refocus attention on their students’ top priority: Jobs after graduation. (Hechinger Report) 

Undocumented people who came to the U.S. as children are seeing their education ambitions thwarted. (Washington Post)

📣 SPOKEN WORD

“Instead of fretting that students’ flagging attention doesn’t serve education, we must make attention itself the thing being taught.”

— D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh and Peter Schmidt, making the case for a new kind of education about “attensity,” the capacity for attention, in an era when, they argue, digital technology is “pumping vast quantities of high-pressure media content into our faces to force up a spume of the vaporous and intimate stuff called attention, which now trades on the open market.” (New York Times) 

😆 BACK OF THE CLASS

WHY DID THE TURKEY GO TO COLLEGE? It’s a good setup for a joke, but there’s not so much a punchline as a quirky explanation. Turns out, after the president pardons gobblers for Thanksgiving, they often end up living in retirement at universities with animal science programs.   

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Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence in Learning and Education | Harvard Graduate School of Education | Cambridge, MA

​The Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) invites applications for a full-time, tenure track faculty position at the rank of Assistant Professor focused on artificial intelligence (AI) in learning and education.

Director of Business Development | The Achievement Network | Remote

We are seeking a Director of Business Development to lead the design and implementation of effective product and services pricing models and strategies to optimize ANets market competitiveness and profitability.

Operations Director - Beast Academy Classroom | Art of Problem Solving | San Diego, CA

The Operations Director will lead tactical execution of the academic year including: tracking, execution, and maintenance of yearly recurring projects, tasks, and responsibilities, such as academic year curriculum pilots.

Educational Technology - Continuing Track Assistant Professor | University of Delaware | Newark, DE

The University of Delaware invites applications for a Continuing Track Assistant Professor of Educational Technology. The position comprises teaching responsibilities as well as program development and coordination.

Director of Development (EdSurge Team) | ISTE - ASCD | Multiple or Remote

Join our team, if you have extraordinary organizational skills, can manage and track multiple overlapping projects yet find areas of alignment across teams with different functions and priorities. This may sound like a big charge, and it is.

Events

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ASCD Annual Conference 24 | March 22 | Washington, DC

Fuel your passion for education and help shape the future of learning at ASCD24. At this must-attend event, you'll meet ASCD authors and education experts who will guide you in improving academic outcomes for all students and help you solve the tough issues facing your school or district.

Learning Impact Conference 2024 | June 3 - 6 | Salt Lake City, UT

Technology is constantly changing. Keep up with the pace through innovation and collaboration. Learning Impact inspires a diverse group of educational providers and edtech suppliers to focus and work together on top issues in education.

Association of College and University Educators Announces Second Annual National Higher Education Teaching Conference | June 13 - 14 | Minneapolis, MN

The second annual National Higher Education Teaching Conference (NHETC) is an opportunity for higher ed leaders, professors, policymakers, researchers, and philanthropists to accelerate a national commitment to excellent teaching in every class.

ISTELive 24 | June 23 - 26 | Denver, CO

At ISTELive 24, June 23-26 in Denver and online, you’ll scale to new learning heights during 900+ strategy-packed sessions that will help you continue to move mountains for students.