Community Colleges

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The Growing Gap Between Females and Males in Educational Attainment in Texas: Evaluating Outcomes for the 8th Grade Cohort

This blog post serves as the second in our summer series where we are looking at the the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s (THECB) 8th grade cohort study, now known as the “Texas Talent Trajectory (T3)” project. In our previous blog post, we noted that 76% (823,083) of the 1.08 million students in the combined three-year 8th-grade cohort…

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Failing to Finish: Tracking the 8th-Grade Cohort in Texas

Within higher education circles, most discussions about student success center on 6-year graduation rates for first-time, full-time, degree-seeking students who enroll right after high school graduation. More recent efforts, such as the IPEDS Outcome Measures that comprised our spring data blog series, have started tracking the success of transfer students in earning higher education credentials. While…

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The Effect of Academic Major and Occupation on Lifetime Earnings

This blog post serves as the third entry in our series reviewing estimated lifetime earnings by educational attainment level. Previous posts have reviewed general trends in terms of educational attainment levels, as well as variance across race/ethnicity categories. In this post, we shift our focus to how earnings differ based on the combination of educational…

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Financial Impact of Educational Attainment by Race/Ethnicity

in our previous blog post, we began a multi-part series looking at estimated lifetime earnings to see general trends across the spectrum of education levels ranging from “less than high school diploma” to “professional degrees.” Overall, data from the Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW) at Georgetown University showed that bachelor’s graduates earn approximately $1.1 million…

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Answering the Age-Old Question: Is a College Degree Worth It?

Is a college degree worth it? This question has pervaded conversations from family dining tables to corporate board rooms to political pulpits for quite awhile in the United States. However, topics such as student loan forgiveness, state support for public institutions, higher costs of attendance, and return-on-investment have increasingly amplified the asking of this question…

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The End Game: Exploring Graduation Rates of CC Transfers to Universities

With the academic calendar signaling the start of a new school year, this blog post will serve as the last installment of our summer series on community colleges in Texas. Our previous posts looked at enrollment trends at community colleges, including the importance of dual credit in Texas, as well as challenges facing transfer students seeking to…

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Upwardly Mobile: The Transition from 2-to-4 year Institutions

In our previous blog post, we reviewed statewide trends related to transfer cohorts from two-year to four-year institutions, as approximately one-third of academic majors starting at community colleges transfer to public universities in Texas within 6 years of first-time enrollment. This blog post will look at “enrollment funnel” data, tracking community college transfer students from…

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The Challenging Reality of Community College-to-University Transfers in Texas

One of the most important metrics for tracking the success of public community colleges in Texas is the number of students who start at two-year institutions and transfer to public universities. According to the Community College “Student Success Funding” formula that was directed by the Texas legislature, transfers carry the second-highest weight (3.0) in the…

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The Importance of Dual Credit for Texas Community Colleges

One of the most prolific trends in the past 20 years has been the exponential growth of dual credit students who are earning college-level credits while still attending high school. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) reported that more than 186,000 students were officially enrolled in dual credit courses across all institutions in Texas…