Elevating College Completion: What Can Be Done to Raise Postsecondary Attainment in America?

Federal higher education debates often focus on expanding access to postsecondary education, but policymakers must also consider ways to get more students to actually complete their studies. Today, only about half of all students will finish college. These lackluster completion rates create large private and societal costs: for the individual, in the form of student debt and lost time and, for society, in forgone tax revenue and wasted public subsidies.

AEI and Third Way hosted a bipartisan research symposium on college completion to explore a new set of research papers on raising degree attainment. Policy experts and researchers discussed the current landscape of college completion, what policies might improve graduation rates, and how policymakers can accomplish these goals without creating perverse incentives for colleges to compromise standards or quality.