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SBCTC Data Dashboards

This guide is to help faculty and administrative staff identify and navigate the data resources curated by SBCTC to enact reflection and institutional-level change.

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Green River College

  • eLearning Department
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Overview

Overview:

Understanding how many students complete their intended degree and how long it takes them to do so are both important. Degree incompletion results in lost investments, both monetarily and time, for students. Delayed time until award completion can prolong and inflate student loan debt while decreasing earning power in the interim. Equitable changes in recent years have increased the number of Black, Native, and Latinx students who have completed their degrees, but the overall rates still lag behind those of White and Asian students (1).

How To Use This Dashboard:

The completion dashboard examines the length of time it takes students to complete either an academic non-transfer degree or a transfer degree as well as creates a visual of the percentage of students that successfully complete their intended degree program. These data can be disaggregated on types of demographic data as well as cohort type and educational intent. Exploration of these disaggregated data can help faculty and staff identify the key predictive indicators of students who are less likely to persist.

References:

  1. “Completing College.” National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, 17 Feb. 2022, https://nscresearchcenter.org/completing-college/.

Orientation

Cohort Selection

Annual cohorts may be disaggregated into subcohorts, allowing you to look at completion rates for specific student cohort populations.

✅ Example: These data examine what percentage of all students, enrolling from 2014-2018, complete their intended degree program within 3 years. Completion rates for student subpopulations based on race/ethnicity are compared between South Seattle College and the aggregate SBCTC system.

Entry Quarter

If examining completion rates and times based on entry quarter (Fall, Winter, or Spring) is important to you, change these settings.

College Selection

If you want to explore the data for a specific college, select it here. Data will be presented on the left, while comparative data to the entire SBCTC system or peer cohort will appear on the right. Learn more about creating peer cohorts here.

✅ Example: These data examine what percentage of all students, enrolling from 2014-2018, complete their intended degree program within 3 years. Completion rates for student subpopulations based on race/ethnicity are compared between South Seattle College and the aggregate SBCTC system.

Educational Intent

You may optionally disaggregate data by educational intent as follows:

  1. Students that intend to transfer: these are students enrolled in academic transfer programs
  2. Students that intend to receive a professional/technical degree: these are students enrolled in 1) academic non-transfer degree programs, 2) professional/technical programs, or 3) applied baccalaureate programs
  3. Other: these are students 1)upgrading their job skills, 2) enrolled in multiple programs, or 3) taking vocational and family/life courses
✅ Example: These data examine what percentage of all students, enrolling from 2014-2018, complete their intended degree program within 3 years. Completion rates for student subpopulations based on race/ethnicity are compared between South Seattle College and the aggregate SBCTC system.

Completion Year

You can monitor how longs it takes students to achieve their intended degree as well as identify what proportion of students complete their degree after 1,2,3, or 4 years.

✅ Example: These data examine what percentage of all students, enrolling from 2014-2018, complete their intended degree program within 3 years. Completion rates for student subpopulations based on race/ethnicity are compared between South Seattle College and the aggregate SBCTC system.

Demographic Disaggregation

Optionally, you may disaggregate the data based on certain demographic features.

✅ Example: These data examine what percentage of all students, enrolling from 2014-2018, complete their intended degree program within 3 years. Completion rates for student subpopulations based on race/ethnicity are compared between South Seattle College and the aggregate SBCTC system.

Intersectionality with Race/Ethnicity

These allows you to explore intersectionality between race and one of the other disaggregation features shown on the previous page, such as financial aid status, gender, etc.

Choose Reporting Year

Years represent the cohort entry year and are displayed along the X-axis of the graph (bottom).

Note: If you are examining completion after three years, the earliest cohort data is from three years prior to the most recent Spring completion.

✅ Example: These data examine what percentage of all students, enrolling from 2014-2018, complete their intended degree program within 3 years. Completion rates for student subpopulations based on race/ethnicity are compared between South Seattle College and the aggregate SBCTC system.

Next Steps

Question:

What percentage of first-time college students attending urban/suburban institutions and receive need-based financial aid complete their intended program within two years of enrollment? How do these completion rates compare for students who are not receiving financial aid? How do these completion rates compare specifically between Edmonds College and the other colleges in the urban/suburban cohort?

Data:

Interpretation:

What we can say:

  • Two-year completion rates are roughly the same between first-time college students who do and do not receive financial aid across urban/suburban institutions.
  • Completion of financial-aid recipients is roughly the same between Edmonds College and other colleges in the cohort.
  • However, students at Edmonds college that do not request financial aid are 30% more likely to complete their intended degree program than those who do receive aid, and generally, these students complete at a higher rate than other colleges within the cohort

What we cannot say about these data:

  • Results cannot be generalized to all financial aid students, only those first-time in College

Follow-Up Questions:

  • It’s curious that students at Edmonds not receiving financial are doing better than those in the peer cohort. Why might this be, or is it just an artifact?
  • What would completion rates look like four years out?

Intervention Strategies

Many of the strategies to support program completion are similar to those that promote retention. In addition, a few more, specifically focused on getting students to complete a program are below.

  • Guide students through the right courses in the right order, and look for red flags of struggle. The guided pathways model is designed to create a systemic institutional approach to create a more transparent and structured educational experience.
  • Work with transfer institutions as well as other community colleges in your system to make sure the program maps you've created are in alignment. When they aren't, students end up taking excessive credits at the community college level to prepare for transfer, which can delay time to program completion as well as discourage progress.
  • Offering online courses may alleviate some of the scheduling and capacity restraints that can inhibit some students from completing required degree courses and actually results in higher likelihood of student completions (1)
  • Similarly, creating diverse modalities and times/days of offering may allow more students to access necessary coursework
  • Offer unique ways for students to receive credits, such as awarding credit for prior learning, conducting a prior learning assessment, creating competency-based courses, accelerated formats, and staggered start dates.
  • General policy consensus is that associates degrees should require no more than 60 credits while bachelors degrees should be around 120 credits, yet a recent survey found that nearly half of community colleges offer associates programs in excess of 60 credits, and the typical community college student completes 80 credits before they receive their associates. A publication by Complete College America provides guidance regarding recommended credit hours for different associates program. Consider taking an inventory of your offered program and adjust requirements accordingly.
  • Anoka-Ramsey Community College (MN) conducted an audit of "near-completers" at their institution, finding that college-specific general education requirements, such as a wellness course or courses meeting institutional outcomes such as "Critical Thinking" or "Human Diversity", were often the remaining missing courses that prevented students from receiving credentials(2). Consider the value-added of such courses and/or think about how institutional outcomes can be more broadly applied across the curricula such that students need not venture outside their degree program for additional courses.

References:

  1.   Fischer C, Baker R, Li Q, Orona GA, Warschauer M. Increasing Success in Higher Education: The Relationships of Online Course Taking With College Completion and Time-to-Degree. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. November 2021. doi:10.3102/01623737211055768  

  2. Kauppila, Sheena A, et al. “Implementing Degrees When Due within a Complex Institutional and Policy Context.” Degrees When Due, Institute for Higher Education Policy, Oct. 2021, https://www.ihep.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/IHEP_DWD_ARCC_CaseStudy_Final.pdf.

Further Reading:

  • “Doing More With Less: Approaches to Shortening Time to Degree,” Cheryl Blanco. November 1994. Available from State Higher Education Executive Officers (www.sheeo.org).
  • Taylor, Jason L, et al. Institute for Higher Education Policy, 2022, Targeting the Technical: Prioritizing Analysis of Student Transcripts in Degree Reclamation Efforts to Improve Student Completion Outcomes, https://www.ihep.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/IHEP_CAEL_final_web.pdf.

Explore the types of questions you can ask using the completion dashboard!

What percentage of students complete their within of enrollment? How do these completion rates compare between students who and between and ?