According to the National Center for Education Statistics, part-time students make up approximately one-fifth of undergraduate students enrolled at four-year public institutions, and a 2015 report by the National Student Clearinghouse found that the transfer rate from four-year public institutions was roughly 37%

• On average, the schools that rank in the top quartile of the mobility metric (meaning they have good outcomes for students) take in 29.3% Pell, while bottom-quartile schools take in 48.6% Pell.
• Among the 81 schools in which half or more of students received Pell grants, only three are in the top quartile of our mobility ranking, and just 14 are in the top half.
• Of the 252 four-year public institutions that have greater than average Pell enrollment (38.2%):
• Only 16.3% graduated at least half of their first-time, full-time students within six years; and,
• At only 17.1% do more than two-thirds of loan-holding students earn more than a high school graduate six years after enrollment.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, part-time students make up approximately one-fifth of undergraduate students enrolled at four-year public institutions, and a 2015 report by the National Student Clearinghouse found that the transfer rate from four-year public institutions was roughly 37%

• Higher cost for low- and moderate-income students (coming from families making $0-$48k/year) does not deliver better results at our public institutions. The average net cost for those students remains virtually the same across the range of schools-whether students are graduating, finding employment, and paying their back loans or not.
• The average top-quartile school (those with good outcomes like completion, earnings, and repayment rates) charges a net price of $10,176, while the average bottom-quartile school (those with the worst outcomes) charges nearly $600 more ($10,762).

Public colleges and universities have long been beacons of hope for millions of Americans seeking to better their lives and improve their economic standing

Each year, they educate the largest proportion of bachelor’s degree-seeking students (about two-thirds of the college-going population), often offering a much more affordable education than their private, non-profit peers. Yet very little is understood about whether these institutions are actually fulfilling their promise to serve as engines of mobility for the 6.8 million students that walk through their doors each year. 6 Specifically, how well are our country’s four-year public colleges and universities equipping students with a degree and the skills they need to obtain well-paying jobs in our modern economy?

To shed some light on this question, we created a mobility metric using data from the Department of Education’s recently-released College Scorecard. Similar to a report we released earlier this year that analyzed the performance of our country’s four-year payday loans in tennessee private, non-profit institutions, the data used in our mobility metric includes outcome measures like graduation rates, post-college earnings, and repayment rates. Due to the limits of the data that is publicly available, the graduation rates included in this report reflect a particular cohort of college-goers: first-time, full-time students.* 7 Of the 535 four-year public colleges and universities for which data was available, we found that nearly 6 in 10 are failing to graduate a majority of their first-time, full-time students, dimming prospects for their future economic success. In addition, our results reveal that there is a wide divergence of quality in our public institutions, with the students who need higher education as an engine of mobility the most often concentrated at schools with the worst outcomes.

We fully recognize that some of the data used in this report is not inclusive of part-time students or those who have transferred from one institution to another. 8 The outcomes data for those students is inaccessible because the Higher Education Act prohibits the federal government from creating a system that would make it possible to track them. 9 It should be noted, however, that part-time students generally are the group least likely to graduate within six years, meaning that their exclusion actually inflates these graduation rates. We also know that a little over half of students who transfer after starting at four-year public institutions transfer down to two-year public schools, and more than three-quarters do not have a bachelor’s degree from any institution six years after their initial enrollment. 10 So while completion rates may actually be slightly higher at these institutions than what is reflected in the College Scorecard data if we were able to capture transfer students who end up graduating with a four-year degree from another school, that small proportion of students does not explain away the 52% who according to the federal data don’t graduate within six years at the average institution.