Stopping out of college not only extends the amount of time it takes to get a degree but is also associated with taking more semesters overall to complete, a report released Thursday by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center shows.
“Stop outs were a major driver of longer completion times,” states the report, titled “Time to Degree” and described by its authors as a “more detailed view” of students’ educational journeys. It says students who stop out end up spending more time “actively enrolled” in order to get their degrees.
“In other words, students who stopped out enrolled additional terms after returning from a stop out to complete compared to those who did not stop out,” the report states.
For bachelor’s degree earners, a stop out added about a year-and-a-half to the median time to degree – bringing it to 5.1 years compared to 3.7 for students with no stop outs, the report states. A second stop out took the median time to 7.3 years.
Active enrolled time for bachelor’s degree earners rose from 3.7 years for those with no stop outs to 4.0 years for those with one stop out; 4.3 years for those with two stop outs and 4.7 years for those with three stop outs.
The report states that Black, Native American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander students were more likely than other groups to stop out before completing a credential; with more than half of associate and certificate completers and one-third of bachelor’s degree completers from these groups stopping out at least once, the report states.
Institutional type matters, but how much and in what way it matters is a different question. For instance, the report found that Black students at HBCUs generally complete associate and certificates faster than those at non-HBCUs, but for those pursuing bachelor’s degrees, it took about the same amount of time – 4.3 years in elapsed time – for Black students at HBCUs and non-HBCUs alike.
Stopping out also seemed to affect students differently based on income. For instance, students from low-income neighborhoods who stopped out twice took 5.3 years in elapsed time to complete a bachelor’s degree, versus 4.4 years for those from the top income quintile neighborhoods.
The report repeatedly uses the term “stop out behavior,” raising questions about the degree to which stopping out is a personal choice or economic coercion, or a complex combination of both.
The report comes at a time when Americans are increasingly questioning the value of a college degree and policymakers are seeking to defund programs with low enrollment or whose graduates earn salaries that are lower than what they would be if they only had a high school diploma.
