Elise and Ram want to understand the academic progress of their first-year students based on their two-year institution’s requirements for satisfactory academic progress. Join them as they use the Postsecondary Data Partnership Credit Completion Ratio dashboard to answer this question.
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Elise is her institution's provost.
She meets with Ram, the Director of Academic Advising, to discuss the satisfactory academic progress of their first year students. To meet satisfactory academic progress, the institution requires students to achieve a minimum of a 2.0 cumulative GPA and complete at least 67% of attempted credit hours. Or, in other words, a student's credit completion ratio must be 67% or higher. Students who do not meet these requirements may lose their financial aid eligibility.
To begin their investigation, they navigate to the PDP credit completion ratio individual-level dashboard. Reviewing the line chart, Ram notes that the credit completion ratio was the lowest in 2018-19, but has steadily improved.
Elise asks if GPA impacts the credit completion ratio. To determine that, Ram applies a dimension by clicking on edit, which opens chart settings. Then he selects "GPA range" from the dimension dropdown and clicks apply settings.
Now they see a line representing each GPA range. Reviewing this chart, it's apparent that students earning higher GPAs are completing a higher percentage of credits compared to students earning lower GPAs. Hovering over the 2022-23 data point representing students with 4.0 to 4.5 GPAs, they find that cohort completed 98% of their credits. When they hover over the data point representing students earning GPAs less than 0.5, they find those students completed only 1.7% of their credits. This is a staggering 96 percentage point gap.
Elise asks if the credit completion ratio has improved or declined among students who are at risk of meeting their institution's satisfactory academic progress. To find that out Ram needs to set a filter. To do that, he clicks on edit, which opens chart settings. Then he clicks on GPA range deselects "all" then selects "0 to 0.5", "0.5 to 1.0", "1.0 to 1.5" and "1.5 to 2.0". Then he clicks apply settings.
Now the dashboard shows student cohorts who earned less than a 2.0 GPA in their first year of college. Reviewing the line chart, they see that the credit completion ratio has declined from 2017-18 with a slight rebound in 2022-23. For the most recent cohort, these students completed only 24% of the credits they attempted.
Elise asks if that pattern is the same for students earning higher GPAs. So Ram resets the GPA filter to only include students with GPAs higher than 3.0. The trend is markedly different. Starting in 2019-20, the credit completion ratio for high academically achieving students has steadily improved. Students in the most recent cohort completed 97% of the credits they attempted.
Elise is concerned for those students who are at risk of meeting their institution's satisfactory academic progress and wonders if their institution is facing a unique challenge. Ram says that there is an easy way to find out using the PDP benchmarking dashboards. They navigate to the PDP credit completion ratio benchmarking dashboard. First Ram needs to choose the institutions he'd like to benchmark against. Ram would like to benchmark against all two-year institutions that are active on the PDP. Under the institution type dropdown, Ram deselects "all" and selects just "two-year" institutions and then clicks the double arrows to move all two year institutions into the benchmarking institutions box. Then he clicks apply settings.
Next, they review the line chart comparing their institution against other 2-year institutions. Elise was happy to see that, in comparison, their institution's students were completing more credits per academic year.
Elise asked asks how their high academically achieving students compare against other institutions. To answer that question, Ram scrolls to the top and clicks on edit, which opens chart settings. Then he clicks on GPA range deselects "all". Then selects "3 to 3.5", "3.5 to 4" and "4 to 4.5". Then he clicks apply settings.
Reviewing the results, they find their institution and their comparison institutions had similar credit completion ratios until 2020-21 then the comparison institutions ratio declined. However, by the most recent cohort, that gap had closed again.
Elise asks to see the results for students who are at risk of meeting their institution's satisfactory academic progress. So Ram resets the dashboard and filters to students with GPAs less than 2.0.
They find their institution and their comparison institutions had similar credit completion ratios until 2020-21. Then a 5 percentage point gap occurred. That gap narrowed to three percentage points in 2022-23.
Elise and Ram summarize what they learned. Students with higher GPAs complete 97% of the credits attempted, which places them on par with their peer institutions. However, students with GPAs of less than 2.0 complete less than 1/4 of the credits they attempt and that ratio was lower than their peer institutions. These students are not making satisfactory academic progress and are at risk for losing their eligibility to receive federal financial aid.
Based on these results, Elise wants to reach out to Student Financial Aid immediately so they can conduct outreach to students who are not making satisfactory academic progress. She also wants to speak to the provosts at their peer institutions to learn how they have improved their credit completion ratios. In addition, Ram wants to meet with his advisers to change how they advise lower GPA students.