The is the second edition of Sallie Mae's "How America Completes College" report, which focuses on the experiences of current undergraduate students and considers the real-time barriers to graduation. This year's report identifies key factors impacting a student's journey from accessing higher education to completing their degree or…

Prior research shows that rural students' education expectations and aspirations, as well as their postsecondary enrollment and persistence rates, tend to be lower than those of nonrural students. However, much of that prior research may not apply to today's students because it uses old data or focuses on individual states or purposive samples.…

After decades of focusing on expansion and access, California's institutions of higher education are now being handed a more difficult charge: to dramatically increase the number of college graduates with diminishing state funding. There is a growing consensus that the United States needs to ratchet up its production of college graduates to turn…

Included in this addendum are the findings for the Noel-Levitz 2011 National Freshman Attitudes Report by race/ethnicity for incoming students. These data show the percentage of students within each group that agreed with each item. Demographic breakdown of the respondents is presented on pages 7 and 8. [For related report, "National Freshman…

A study of the debt levels of graduate and professional students is reported in narrative, data tables, and graphs. Highlights include: total annual borrowing through federal loan programs has accelerated dramatically, with more than a million graduate and professional students now borrowing nearly $8 billion per year; graduate and professional…