An estimated 31 million or more US students over the last 20 years enrolled in but did not complete post-secondary education¶
Claim · All claims
Evidence · 1 study · causalr?·q1
Currency · newest study 2019 · not yet checked against its sources · not reviewed by a person · overdue for a recheck since 2024: baselines and conditions change
Subclaims¶
Reading the evidence codes
q is the design tier, i the impact, n the sample, and the kind with its r
the rigour judged within that kind: what each code means.
This claim: no standardized effect is recorded in observations/ for it yet, so no benchmark reading is possible.
q1 i? Over 31 million students over the last 20 years have enrolled in but not completed post-secondary education in the US, per the estimate the paper cites. → Greg King 2019
Evidence¶
Greg King 2019¶
Greg King. (2019). A path to completion? The impacts of statewide articulation agreements on enrollment and attainment. NWEA Research white paper. https://www.nwea.org/research/publication/a-path-to-completion-the-impacts-of-statewide-articulation-agreements-on-enrollment-and-attainment/
q1 · i? · causal · r?
A background statistic the paper cites from Shapiro and colleagues (2014) to motivate the college-completion problem; the paper reports the figure second-hand and offers no independent analysis of it on this page.
"It is estimated that over 31 million students over the last 20 years have enrolled in but not completed post-secondary education (Shapiro, Dunbar, Yuan, Harrell, Will, & Ziskin, 2014)."
Discussion¶
Related Claims¶
- The 2023 Post-secondary Attainment Index for CPS ninth-graders is 31%, up 0.4 percentage points from 2022 — related
- If current rates hold, only 20 percent of current CPS ninth-graders will complete a bachelor's degree within 10 years (2019 BDAI), with 18 percent via a direct pathway — related
- The study also examines persistence in college over the first two postsecondary years — related
- The 2020 Post-Secondary Attainment Index is 27 percent, and no race/ethnicity and gender group reaches the 75 percent aspiration benchmark — related
- CPS graduates took more than 6,000 distinct post-secondary paths, so continuous enrollment at one college was not the standard route to a credential — related
Page metadata
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
type |
claim |
id |
31-million-enrolled-not-completed |
title |
An estimated 31 million or more US students over the last 20 years enrolled in but did not complete post-secondary education |
description |
An estimated 31 million or more US students over the last 20 years enrolled in but did not complete post-secondary education |
status |
review |
evidence_strength |
weak |
newest_evidence |
2019 |
recheck_by |
2024 |
generated |
by process:wiki-ingest on 2026-10-09 |
trust |
unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content |
sources |
1 — greg-king-2019 |
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