Transitions from high school to college are challenging for many students, but key for long-term success. Thus, they are a major focus of education policy and research. However, systematically measuring how students progress from high school to college can be difficult, largely because it requires linking data from disparate K–12 and postsecondary systems. Currently, there is no central source of data on whether high school graduates are enrolling, persisting, and completing postsecondary education by the state of the high school they attended.
In partnership with the National Student Clearinghouse, Mathematica embarked on an effort to use existing data to produce timely measures of high school to postsecondary transitions by year and state of high school attended. This partnership was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The resulting measures produced include college enrollment, persistence, and completion rates for the 2002 to 2019 cohorts of high school graduates in all 50 states.
The data can be explored or downloaded below. Additional information on the data sources and methodology used to create the reported measures is available in the research brief “Measuring High School to Postsecondary Transitions by State and Year: Opportunities and Challenges.”
