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There may be growing anxiety among many college students and their parents over whether attaining a bachelor’s degree is worth the expense, especially when student loans are involved. Two surveys—both, ironically, commissioned by companies that provide student loans—conducted last spring with young adults reveal some of the concerns. In the survey from Ascent Student Loans, 51% of respondents said they “do not believe the value of a college education has kept up with the rising cost.” Almost half said they were responsible for paying at least 50% of their school tab. In a survey from Discover Student Loans, 26% of current students and recent graduates were worried they’d need to take on a second job and give up leisure activities in order to pay off loan debt for their education, but that percentage rose to 59% among young adults who had been out of college for a few years. However, a lack of financial literacy may be contributing to students’ apprehension. More than 40% of the Discove...

Four-fifths of the students who first enroll in community colleges intend to move on to a four-year school to obtain a bachelor’s degree, yet just 32% make that transfer within six years and even fewer graduate. A new guide aims to help improve that rate. The Columbia University Community College Research Center, working with the Aspen Institute and other research organizations, studied institutions with much higher rates of transfer and completion. “These colleges clearly made transfers a priority. They made transferring a default plan for every student, rather than optional,” researcher John Fink said in an Education Dive report . The center’s guide identifies a number of actions institutions can take to assist transfer students. First, two- and four-year schools must communicate with each other about degree requirements so that curriculum can be designed to enable students to step up to a university without taking extra classes. As it is, too many community college students discover...

A small but significant uptick in the number of U.S. college students attaining their degrees last spring is being hailed as a positive indicator for the national economy. “For the more than 2.27 million students who started college six years ago, the signs of postrecession recovery are clear: adult students shrank as a share of the cohort, four-year public and private nonprofit institutions increased their share of the cohort, and the total completion rate surpassed the prerecession high,” said Doug Shapiro, executive director of the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) Research Center, in i ts annual report on enrollment and graduation patterns for each incoming class. A key benchmark is the graduation percentage after six years. Approximately 56.9% of the fall 2011 freshmen had graduated as of 2017. That outpaces the six-year graduation mark for the 2010 freshman class (54.8%) and the 2007 freshman class (56.1%), which had previously been the highest to date. Almost 12% of the 2011...

Colleges and universities that spend more on students—even if they raise tuition prices—are more likely to see a bounce in enrollment and graduation rates than schools that trim their budgets and tuition rates. A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research appears to upend the conventional wisdom that reducing tuition would attract higher enrollment and also help students finish their studies faster. At least for public schools, according to a MarketWatch article about the study, the numbers are different. “If your goal is to graduate more students, spending increases work better per-dollar than tuition cuts at accomplishing that goal,” noted David Deming, who was among the researchers in the study. Deming is a professor of public policy, education, and economics at the Harvard Kennedy School. The study found that, from 1990-2013, enrollment and graduation rates rose with each 10% jump in a public institution’s spending. Schools that raised tuition did not see any effect o...