Elise and Ram want to understand the academic progress of their first-year students based on their two-year institution’s requirements for satisfactory academic progress. Join them as they use the Postsecondary Data Partnership Credit Completion Ratio dashboard to answer this question.
Transcript
Elise is her institution’s Provost.
She meets with Ram, the Director of Academic Advising, to discuss the satisfactory academic progress of their first-year students. Students who do not meet these requirements may lose their financial aid eligibility.
The institution requires students to ….
[click] achieve a minimum of a 2.0 cumulative GPA
[click] and complete at least 67% of attempted credit hours. Or, in other words, a student’s credit completion rate must be 67% or higher.
To better understand their first-year students’ credit completion, Elise logs onto the Postsecondary Data Partnership (or PDP) dashboards and …
[click] clicks on the Credit Completion Ratio Institution-Level dashboard.
Because their current strategic plan started in 2015-16, she filters out the 2014-15 cohort.
Looking at the line chart, she sees that the credit completion ratio was 75.9% in 2015-16 (or an average of 15.7 credits earned) but had declined to 71.6% in 2020-21 (or an average of 10 credits earned).
Ram asks if GPA could impact the credit completion ratio. Elise applies the “GPA Range” dimension, which disaggregates the line chart. Each line represents a different GPA range. Then, Elise removes those students whose GPA was unknown.
Hovering over the 2020-21 data point for students earning a 3.5 GPA to a 4.0 GPA, they find that cohort completed 96.1% of their credits.
• Moving down to the line representing students earning between a 3.0 and 3.5 GPA, they see that those students completed 91.9% of their credits.
• Moving down again, they find that students earning a 2.5 to 3.0 GPA completed 86.4% of their credits.
• Moving down another line, they find that students earning between a 2.0 and 2.5 GPA completed 77.7% of their credits.
• The next line below represents students earning between a 1.5 and 2.0 GPA. Those students earned an average of 62.7% of their credits.
• Moving to the lowest line representing students earning less than a 0.5 GPA, they found that those students only completed 2.8% of their credits.
While Elise and Ram suspected that students earning a higher GPA likely completed a higher percentage of credits while students who earned a lower GPA completed a lower percentage of credits, the PDP dashboard displayed clear evidence that students earning less than a 2.0 GPA are at risk for losing their federal financial aid due to lower GPA and a lower credit completion ratio.
Ram asks Elise if there was a change in credit completion ratio for students earning less than a 2.0 GPA. Elise looks in the bottom left quadrant and sees that students who earn less than a 2.0 GPA are consistently under the two-thirds threshold.
To view the percentages, Elise removes the dimension and adds a GPA filter to include only students earning less than a 2.0 GPA. They see that, over the last 6 cohorts, the credit completion rate dropped from 29.2% to 24.3%, resulting in a 5-percentage point loss.
Next, Elise begins to explore the impact of other dimensions to learn more about those characteristics. First, she applies the gender dimension. The completion rate was consistent across gender, so there’s no need to target an intervention there.
For age, students 20 and younger make up a large percentage of the population. However, this population experience a 4 percent decline in their completion rate between the 2019-20 and 2020-21 cohorts. Students older than 24 had the lowest completion rate, but most of this population is part-time.
She also notices that race/ethnicity may be a factor as their Black or African American population has a lower credit completion rate.
Then, Ram asks if the trend was the same for students earning higher than a 2.0 GPA. Elise changes the Dimension to “Overall” and then changes the GPA filter to include students earning over a 2.0 GPA. They find that in 2015-16, the credit completion ratio was 86.3%. But in 2020-21, the credit completion ratio rose to 91.2% for a 5-percentage point gain.
So, in 2020-21, while lower GPA students were completing fewer credits, higher GPA students were completing more credits compared to 2015-16.
While Ram is surprised by those results, he believes that their institution isn’t unique. Elise says that there is an easy way to find that out.
Elise goes to the home page of the PDP dashboards and …
[click] clicks on the Credit Completion Ratio Benchmarking dashboard.
She sets the benchmarking group by removing the 4-year institutions and again removes the 2014-15 cohort from the reporting because their current strategic plan started in 2015-16.
[NOTE: WE NEED TO SHOW THEM HOW TO CREATE THE BENCHMARKING GROUP BUT THEN ACTUALLY DO THE RECORDING USING 4-YEAR INSTITUTIONS AS THE BENCHMARKING GROUP SINCE THE STORY IS BETTER]
Looking at the line chart, they see that their institution lagged behind the benchmarking group for each cohort reported. Hovering over the 2015-16 data point, they find that their benchmarking group had a credit completion ratio of 84.7% compared to the 75.9% for their institution.
Then, hovering over the 2020-21 data point, they see that their benchmarking group improved its credit completion ratio to 87.9% while their institution’s ratio dropped to 71.6%. This widened the gap to over 16 percentage points.
Ram asks to see the comparison of their institution against their peers for students earning above a 2.0 GPA. Elise applies the GPA Range filter to include only those students.
Looking at the results, the gap between their institution and their peers closed considerably. Hovering over the 2020-21 data point, they see that their peers’ credit completion ratio was 95.4% compared to their institution’s ratio of 91.2% for a 4 percentage-point gap.
Then, Ram asks to see the comparison for students earning a GPA less than a 2.0 so Elise changes that filter.
In 2015-16, their peer’s credit completion ratio was 42.4%, which increased to 45.8% in 2020-21. But their institution’s credit completion ratio declined from 29.2% to 24.3% during that same time.
So, the gap between their institution and its peers widened from 13 percentage points to nearly 22 percentage points.
That was sobering news.
Elise and Ram summarize what they learned.
[click] Among students with higher GPAs, their students completed over 90% of credits attempted, which placed them on-par with their peer institutions.
[click] However, students with GPAs less than 2.0 completed less than a third of the credits they attempted. And, that ratio was much lower than their peer institutions. These students are not making satisfactory academic progress and are at risk for losing their eligibility to receive federal financial aid.
In the future, Elise will also look at the benchmarking dashboard to see how states around them are doing. Based on these results,
[click] Elise wants to reach out to Student Financial Aid immediately so they can conduct outreach to students who are not making satisfactory academic progress. She also wants to speak to the provosts at their peer institutions to learn how they have improved their credit completion ratios.
[click] In addition, Ram wants to meet with his advisors to change how they advise lower GPA students.