Graduation Rates for Popular Online Colleges

[sanantone]

The Department of Education changed how it calculates graduation rates a few years ago. As you can see on each college's profile on the College Scorecard website, the numbers include full-time and part-time students and transfer and first-time students. A commenter is referencing outdated articles from 2016. 

I was curious to see the graduation rates at some of the popular colleges and universities that are completely or mostly online or have a large online student body. I just kind of picked schools that popped in my head by sector and looked at a list of schools that have the most online students. I left out the community colleges since most don't offer 4-year programs. 

These are 8-year graduation rates. With the exception of Liberty University, all of these schools have acceptance rates above 80%. I avoided more traditional schools like Arizona State University because they're selective. I didn't grab the numbers for Devry, Strayer, or University of Phoenix because they're broken down by campus, and I wasn't going to look at all of them. I guess Colorado State University Global Campus is too new as an accredited university to have an 8-year graduation rate. All of the for-profits that were recently purchased by public and not-for-profit university systems are categorized as for-profit because they haven't been non-profit long enough to witness any potential changes in 8-year graduation rates. 

It was interesting to see that nationally accredited schools like Full Sail and Columbia Southern had higher graduation rates than the regionally accredited for-profit universities. I'm hesitant to do a direct comparison because I taught at an NA school and an RA school, and the accreditation standards were drastically different. 


For-profit

Capella - 11%

Colorado Technical University - 25%

Ashford University (purchased in 2020) - 25%

APUS - 22%

Walden - 21%

Grand Canyon (conversion to non-profit is recent and hasn't been fully approved) - 33%

Purdue/Kaplan (purchased in 2018) - 26%

Full Sail - 39%

Columbia Southern - 49% 

Northcentral (purchased in 2019) - 34%


Not-for-profit

Liberty - 40%

WGU - 43%

SNHU - 51% 

Excelsior - 46%

Bellevue - 41%

Brandman (recently purchased by UMass) - 64%


Public 

TESU - 44%

Fort Hays - 61%

University of Maryland Global Campus - 27% 

Northern Arizona University - 58%

Lamar University - 39%

Central Washington University - 60%

Charter Oak State College - 61%

SUNY Empire State College - 44%


https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/