Postsecondary Data Partnership Insights:
Early Indicators of Timely Completers
December 12, 2024
The Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP) is a service of the National Student Clearinghouse established in 2017 to empower institutions with more comprehensive data, easier analysis, centralized reporting functions, and interactive visualizations with benchmarking functionality and centralized reporting functions to better streamline and enable partnerships with third parties. Data provided by participating PDP institutions are unique among existing national public and private sources and capture rich information such as student placement, course enrollment, grades, and credits attempted and earned. The purpose of the PDP Insights reports is to utilize this unique data set to better understand the role of different key performance indicators in student progress and credential completion.
The first PDP Insights report, released in 2022, focused on two key early success indicators — first-year credit accumulation and course completion — for the 2019-2020 entering cohort. Given the sudden shift to online education in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the second PDP Insights report (released in January 2024) tracked changes in first-year credit accumulation and course completion over time among cohorts who entered before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The purpose of this new report is to analyze the differences between timely completers and students who did not complete in either a timely manner or at all, on several key early indicators. This report uses a sample of credential-seeking (associate/certificate or bachelor’s degree) full-time starters who first enrolled during the fall semester of the 2016-2017 academic year at a PDP institution.
Data is presented in an interactive dashboard that allows users to select the student group and time to completion of interest. An accompanying PDF presents the findings of descriptive statistics, along with a regression model to assess the predictive value of these early success indicators on timely completion.
- Students who completed credentials had higher first-year GPAs, earned more credits in their first year, completed most of the courses they attempted in their first year, and enrolled more often in their second year than students who did not complete their credentials in a timely manner.
- Timely completers, on average, earned more than 90% of the credits they attempted in their first year and nearly all timely completers continued to be enrolled in a second year, either at the same or different institution. This is true regardless of how long it took to complete their credential,
- Second-year enrollment is particularly important for students pursuing an associate/certificate. The second-year enrollment rate for non-completers was 32 percentage points lower than students who completed their associate/certificate. This gap is twice as large as the gap between bachelor’s completers and non-completers (16 percentage points).
- The early success indicators of timely completers were higher than those of non-completers across all ethno-racial groups, genders, ages at enrollment, and fields of study. Furthermore, the disparities in early success indicators among demographic groups and fields of study were significantly smaller for completers. For example, the first-year credit completion ratio for associate/certificate completers ranged from 91% to 97% (6 percentage points) across the different ethnoracial groups, compared to a range of 56% to 76% (20 percentage points) for non-completers.
- Most student demographic variables, such as race/ethnicity, gender, and age, are significant predictors of college completion, but their impact is less than that of early indicators. An exception is the first-year student major; for instance, majoring in social sciences has a stronger association with timely completion than credit completion ratio.
- The importance of early indicators in predicting completion varied by credential sought:
- Associate/certificate seekers: Second-year retention (enrolling at the same institution) was the most important early success indicator followed by first-year credits earned, first-year GPA, and first-year credit completion ratio (CCR).
- Bachelor’s degree seekers: First-year GPA emerged as the most important of the early success indicators, followed by second-year retention, first-year CCR, and first-year credits earned.