Governors face unprecedented demands across state government to deliver vital services in an environment of constrained resources. Higher education is no exception. States must increase the number of high-quality college graduates within available funding to meet workforce needs and compete globally. To meet this goal, policymakers--including governors--and higher education leaders need comprehensive and consistent performance metrics for public campuses and systems to inform policy decisions and pinpoint areas for improvement. This requires overcoming the barriers posed by incomplete and inconsistent data. Recognizing the importance of college completion to the nation's economic vitality, incoming NGA (National Governors Association) Chair West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin III, is launching an initiative to help all states improve higher education performance. In Complete to Compete, states will work to increase college completion and improve higher education efficiency. To accomplish this objective, states will need to collect and report comparable data and implement policies aligned with these goals. As a foundation for future state action, NGA convened a Work Group on Common College Completion Metrics to make recommendations on the common higher education measures that all states should collect and report publicly. The work group benefited from an extensive, external review of the metrics and found substantial consensus on which to build their recommendations. This paper aims to equip states with a set of common college completion metrics that can be used to monitor system performance and inform future policy decisions. Comparable higher education outcome and progress data are necessary to meet the guiding priorities of increased graduates, decreased minority and low-income attainment gaps, and improved performance using existing resources. (Contains 11 endnotes.)