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Despite surveys indicating that nearly 80 per cent of community college students aspire to earn a bachelor's degree, only about a third transfer to a four-year institution, and fewer than half of those who do transfer go on to earn a bachelor's degree within six years of community college entry. This set of two reports - one focused on community colleges and the other on four-year institutions - analyzes student data from the National Student Clearinghouse to measure the performance of community colleges and four-year institutions in enabling students who started at a community college as part of the fall 2015 cohort to transfer and earn a bachelor's degree. The reports, authored by researchers at Community College Research Centre (CCRC) and the Aspen Institute, serve as a call to action to improve ineffective and inefficient transfer pathways in higher education. They also provide metrics that institution and state system leaders can use to benchmark their performance and evaluate efforts to improve student outcomes.

The study is the first of its kind to report state-by-state transfer rates and outcomes by student subgroup, finding that low-income (11 per cent), older (6 per cent), Black (9 per cent), and Hispanic (13 per cent) students transfer and complete bachelor's degrees at even lower rates than community college students overall (16 per cent). It finds only modest progress in transfer performance over the past seven years, a prior report [available at TD/TNC 123.478] released by CCRC and Aspen in 2016 found a cohort bachelor's completion rate of 14 per cent.

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In the US each year, nearly 2.5 million high school students take dual enrollment college courses, which are now offered at 90 per cent of public high schools across the country. This report provides national and state-by-state results on the success of dual enrollment students, broken down by racial/ethnic group, neighborhood income, and gender. Using National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) data, the report presents findings on the postsecondary enrollment and completion outcomes of high school students who began taking dual enrollment college courses in fall 2015, tracked up to four years after high school. The authors compare postsecondary outcomes among dual enrollees to outcomes of other recent high school graduates entering higher education without prior dual enrollment experience.

The analyses in this report reveal substantial state-by-state differences in dual enrollment student outcomes. Colleges and states can use the findings to assess whether they need to prioritize efforts to broaden access to dual enrollment, increase dual enrollment student success, or both. Additional state-level findings and guidance can be found in the data dashboard accompanying this report.

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