Every year, millions of new college students arrive on campus lacking the necessary academic skills to perform at the college level. Postsecondary institutions address this problem with extensive remedial programs designed to strengthen students' basic skills. While much research on the effectiveness of remedial education has been conducted,…

Producing sufficient numbers of graduates who are prepared for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) occupations has become a national priority in the United States. To attain this goal, some policymakers have targeted reducing STEM attrition in college, arguing that retaining more students in STEM fields in college is a…

This Statistics in Brief focuses on students whose parents have not attended college and examines these students' high school success and postsecondary enrollment, persistence and degree completion once they enrolled in college, and graduate school enrollment and employment outcomes after they attained a bachelor's degree. Their outcomes are…

Rising concern about America's ability to maintain its competitive position in the global economy has renewed interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education. To understand who enters into and completes undergraduate programs in STEM fields, this report examined data from three major national studies: the 1995-96…

This First Look report presents selected findings from the 2012/17 Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (BPS:12/17), a nationally representative survey of undergraduates who entered postsecondary education for the first time in the 2011-12 academic year. BPS:12/17 covers the experiences of these first-time beginning postsecondary…

After dramatic growth between 1970 and 1990, part-time students have formed a large and stable segment of the undergraduate population in U.S. postsecondary institutions (Hussar 2005). In fall 2004, approximately 5.5 million undergraduates were enrolled part time, making up 37 percent of the undergraduate enrollment in all degree-granting…

The report uses longitudinal data from the 1992-93 Baccalaureate and Beyond Study (B&B:93/03) to examine the characteristics related to graduate degree enrollment, persistence, and completion among 1992-93 bachelor's degree recipients. About 40 percent of 1992-93 bachelor's degree recipients had enrolled in a graduate degree program by 2003.…

This report uses data from the third follow-up of the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 and the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study to project postsecondary outcomes of the high school class of 1992. Specifically, the study tracked, over a four-year period, the paths of college-qualified students who first enrolled in a…