Learn how to use the Postsecondary Data Partnership Credit Completion Ratio dashboard to understand the credit completion ratio for our new transfer-in students.
Transcript
In this tutorial, we demonstrate how to use the PDP Credit Completion Ratio dashboard to understand the credit completion ratio for our new transfer-in students.
As a quick reminder, the Credit Completion Ratio Institution-Level dashboard reports how successful students are at completing the credits they attempt within their first year of college. Why is this important? Studies show that higher first-year credit completion ratios are linked with higher credential completion rates. This metric helps identify student populations in need of early intervention.
For this dashboard, as well as all PDP dashboards, first-year students are students who enrolled in college for the first-time and students who have newly transferred-in to our institution.
Let’s use this dashboard to answer this research question: Among transfer-in students, who are prepared to take college-level English courses, how many credits did they attempt in their first year at our institution and how many did they complete?
Before we continue, please remember that the results and trends shown in this tutorial can not be applied to your institution. This data is only for demonstration purposes only. Please review your institution’s data before drawing conclusions.
On the Home Page for the Postsecondary Data Partnership dashboards, one of the early momentum metrics is the Credit Completion Ratio Institution-Level dashboard. Clicking this icon brings us to the dashboard.
This question is focused on a particular student population – transfer-in students who are prepared to take college-level English courses. That tells us that we need to apply two filters. Let’s click Enrollment Type, deselect “All,” and select “Transfer-In,” then click “Apply”. Next, let’s click English Prep, deselect “All,” select “Ready in English”, and then click Apply”.
You can see that every chart has shifted because we have filtered the underlying data to transfer-in students who are prepared for English-level college courses.
Next, let’s look at the bar chart in the lower left quadrant and hover over the 2018-19 data bar to see the details pop-up. Here, we see that transfer-in students attempted, on average, 17.3 credits in their first year at the institution. Of those, they completed 13.9 credits for a credit completion ratio of 77.6%
What else can we learn about this student population?
Let’s explore if the credit completion ratio for transfer-in students is impacted by whether they have received a Pell Grant. Because we want to compare student populations, we need to apply a dimension. Click “Select Dimension” and select “Pell Grant Recipient”.
Now, in the line-chart visualization, we have three lines – a line representing “No,” which means those students haven’t received Pell Grants, a line representing “Yes” for those students who have received Pell Grants, and a line for “Unknown” representing students whose Pell Grant Status is unknown. We see that the relative size of “Pell Grant Recipients” with an unknown status is fairly small, so let’s assume it doesn’t help our understanding of the impact of Pell Grants on credit completions, and let’s filter that data out. Click “Pell Grant Recipient”, deselect “Unknown”, and click “Apply”.
Now, let’s look at the results. Hovering over the 2018-19 data point in the line chart, we see a credit completion ratio of 83.7% for transfer-in students who were not Pell Grant Recipients compared to 72.5% for transfer-in student who were Pell Grant recipients.
What did we learn?
Transfer-in students complete, on average, 8 out of 10 credits attempted in their first-year of college at the institution
And transfer-in students who received Pell Grants have a lower credit completion ratio compared to transfer-in students who did not receive Pell Grants.
This information would be useful to academic advisors during their initial meetings with new transfer-in students.
We encourage you to use your institution’s PDP dashboards to better understand your students’ credit completion ratios and the impact they have on their success. Thank you for joining us.