“Graduation rates are a terrible way to measure transfer and part-time student degree completion. This is a long standing debate,” Hammang said.
Graduation rates came into use by national data collectors because “it was doable with the data that was available,” Hammang said, who also supports the creation of Unicode federal database to track students moving across institutions. But will more detailed data sets show greater graduation rates?
“The answer is we are not sure but it would create a clearer picture. When you identify a problem you can deal with it,” he said.
