Imagine a student who begins taking college courses while still in high school through a dual enrollment program. By the time they arrive on campus as freshmen, they have already earned credits.
They are the first in their family to attend a four-year institution. Concentrate. Able. Work part-time to help support the household. They succeed in their first year. Then their second.
Somewhere along the way, things change. An unexpected expense. A change in working hours. A delay in financial aid. Nothing dramatic in itself, but that’s enough. They stop. They plan to return next semester.
But that’s not the case.
If you sIf you spend time at any college registration meeting today, you’ll hear the same concerns: fewer students waiting, more competition, looming demographic cliff. Institutions are scrambling to find a way to attract more students. But that’s only part of the story, and not the most urgent one.
More than 43 million Americans have started college and I left without a diploma. They signed up. They introduced themselves. And somewhere along the way, they slipped.
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National completion rates have improved over time, with completion rates over six years now exceeding 60 percent. Yet nearly four in ten students who enter college do not graduate within six years. In most sectors, a pass rate of just over 60 percent would not be considered acceptable; this would be considered a warning sign.
Yet we have become accustomed to the idea that a large portion of students will simply not complete their studies. This is not a reality we should accept. We have normalized incompleteness as a structural feature of American higher education, and in doing so we have made peace with moral and economic catastrophe.
THE 43 million College-educated Americans with no degrees are not failures. They are living proof of an infrastructure that was never designed to carry them out. They entered in a moment of hope and left in a moment of difficulty. Their results reflect systems built for a traditional student population that no longer represents the majority of today’s learners.
We have not rebuilt our systems to serve them.
Higher education systems were largely designed around full-time residential 18-year-olds who entered directly from high school with the financial support of their families. Again today’s students increasingly balancing work, family responsibilities, financial pressures and other obligations alongside their studies. Flexibility, rather than conforming to a traditional model, has become essential.
Across the United States, black and Hispanic students continue to earn bachelor’s degrees at lower rates than their white and Asian peers. These disparities are often linked to differences in financial resources, educational opportunities, and how students experience institutional environments and support systems. These are not marginal differences. They represent a completion gap of nearly 30 points between groups who were promised access to the same diploma and the economic mobility it is supposed to provide.
Students who stop their studies without a diploma are often in a worse situation economically than if they had never registered at all. They often carry debt without realizing the salary benefits associated with earning a degree, and they are much more likely to default on their student loans.
They sign up for the promise of a better life and too often emerge with a financial burden and no credentials to prove.
In 2012, the state of Georgia launched GPS Tipsa predictive analytics platform that updates student records every night and constantly analyzed more than 800 academic and financial risk indicators for each student. Advisors receive real-time alerts and respond within days, not semesters, allowing them to provide help before students drop out. They also created Panther Retention Grantsby proactively identifying students facing modest financial barriers and providing targeted emergency assistance before these students discontinue their studies.
The school demonstrated what is possible when institutions rethink themselves based on student completion rather than student sorting. Thanks to these efforts, State of Georgia increased the number of baccalaureates awarded each year by approximately 28 percent between 2010 and 2021. Bachelor’s degrees awarded to Black students increased by 57 percent, while bachelor’s degrees awarded to Hispanic students increased by more than 120 percent. Most notably, for several years in a row, Black, Hispanic, first-generation, and low-income students graduated at rates equal to or higher than the college average.
Georgia State didn’t do this by recruiting different students. He did this by building systems tailored to the students he already had. The students were still capable. The infrastructure was not.
Proactive advice, emergency financial help that scales quickly, and data systems that reveal people in difficulty before they leave have made a huge difference.
Related: As more rural students apply to college, attention turns to their success.
Colleges must develop programs that reflect the way students live and work and that hold institutions accountable for student success, not just enrollment. Colleges also need to reconnect with students who have dropped out but are close to completing their degrees. Many are only a class or two away.
The enrollment crisis is real. But the completion crisis is larger, older, quieter and more devastating. We have spent a decade debating the gateway to American higher education. It is high time to look at the millions of students who have already left, received in hand, without the diplomas they came for.
They needed us to meet them where they were. In too many cases, we have not done so.
Emmanuel Lalande is senior vice president of enrollment strategy and student success at Columbia College Chicago, a private, nonprofit school for creatives that offers a curriculum blending creative and media arts, liberal arts, and business.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
This story about completing college was produced by The Hechinger reportan independent, nonprofit news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Register with Hechinger weekly newsletter.
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