graduation

The twelfth comic in the College Parents of America Humor series is now available on Collegeparents.org. This comic, made in a collaborative act between College Parents of America and Hector Curriel, is not truly part of the humor series, but instead extends our warmest congrats to students and parents of the class of 2014. 

The share of young Americans living with parents hit a high of 40.9% in 1940, just a year after the official end of the Great Depression, and fell to a low of 24.1% in 1960. It hovered between about 31% and 33% from 1980 to the mid-2000s, when the rate started climbing steadily.

What's your student's magic number for graduation? Hint: it's probably not the same as "full-time" status.

    You have (or, your student has) just finished a college degree. Congrats! It's a huge accomplishment. And, perhaps best of all, no more assigned homework. However, just because no one is assigning more reading to be done at home doesn't mean you shouldn't devour writings on important topics. Today, we're suggesting the first of five critical topics for recent graduate readings. We may not be your professor, but these readings still count for pass/fail--in real life. Consider these required readings. 

  image on cc license from flickr user Elmira College  This week, Pew Research Center released their 2013 compiled data on those who did not attend college and those who graduated college in order to compare earnings, poverty, unemployment, job satisfaction and other measures. Unsurprisingly, college graduates fared far better on such metrics.

  (photo by flickr user Sean MacEntee)For families seeking to maximize their investment in college, it is wise to compare completion and retention rates for potential schools. Two recent U.S. News and World Report posts reflect upon important aspects of student progress toward completion: freshman retention rate and 4-year graduation rate.

 Last week, we posted College without Completion -- Post #1, which discussed National Center for Educational Statistics's published statistics on cohort graduation rates. We continue the College without Completion thread with this post.(image by flickr user ben.chaney)In the last College without Completion post, we shared that, according to NCES, 42.7% of students did not get a bachelor's degree from the college at which they began within 6 years (Source). In this post, we look at the effects of leaving college without a degree. There are multiple ways in which a student and his or her immediate family might be affected by a student's decision to leave college.A student's potential earnings, as well as a student's quality of life, can be greatly diminished by the lack of a degree.Students who have some college but no degree face a higher unemployment rate and sub-median weekly pay check (Source).Students with a bachelor's degree or a higher degree report a lower level of poverty, a slightly higher job satisfaction rate, a lower obesity rate and children that are better prepared for school (Source).

2 in 5 students who attend college fail to get a degree from the college at which they began within 6 years.(pic from flickr user smemon87)This scary statistic is based on data from the U.S. Government's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). According to the NCES, 42.7% of students did not get a bachelor's degree from the college at which they began within 6 years.