Completion of tertiary education

Why This Is Important

Completion is useful as a measure of the rate of production of qualifications from New Zealand's tertiary education system, and hence as an indicator for the rate of a country's skills acquisition. Completion also provides an indicator of the internal efficiency or quality of the tertiary education system. Having said this, it should be recognised that there are many factors outside of the tertiary education system that will impact on outcomes, and that concepts of retention and completion as markers of quality need to be read in the context of other indicators.

The term 'completion' used here refers to successful completion of a qualification, rather than a course.

Students may enrol for a qualification, but abandon it once they have met their objectives, which may be passing only two or three courses. Many leave study (in particular, in times of higher employment), with only one or two courses left to complete for their qualification.

To that extent, if a high proportion of students do not complete their qualifications, this can not necessarily be read as a system failure. Further, lower completion rates in a qualification may not mean that learning is wasted, for example, when course passes are cross-credited to another qualification.

New Zealand's lifelong approach to tertiary learning, relatively open access to enrolment, and easy access to student loans, have tended to increase the number of students with a focus on part-time course-based study, and those trying to combine work with study. This is borne out in other countries, which have higher academic entry requirements, more full-time study, and less access to student support. Recent statistics in Britain show that the institutions with the highest drop-out rates were also the ones that generally excelled at attracting students from under-represented groups. Therefore, completion goals can not be viewed in isolation from access goals.

Indicator

Five-year tertiary completion rates

Numerator: (Data Source: Ministry of Education: Tertiary Student Enrolment & Completion Dataset)
Total number of domestic students who commenced a qualification in 2001, in a tertiary education organisation, and had completed a tertiary qualification at the same level or higher by the end of 2008.

Denominator: (Data Source: Ministry of Education: Tertiary Student Enrolment & Completion Dataset)
Total number of domestic students who commenced a qualification in 2001, in a tertiary education organisation.

Interpretation Issues

The definition used to calculate qualification completion rates has changed from that used in previously published indicators. The new definition now includes students who completed a qualification at a higher level instead of the one they started. The period over which the rate applies has been extended from five years to eight years after starting. This recognises the fact that a significant number of students study part-time and five-year rates tended to present an under-estimate of rates of qualification completion. In particular, at doctorate level where completion rates after 5 years were about a half of the rate after 10 years.

A number of revisions of tertiary data were made during 2008.  This has resulted in differences in numbers (and rates) for some tertiary measures between what was shown in the previous version of this indicator and what appears currently.  The two principal reasons for these differences are provided below.

A major review was undertaken of the quality of qualification award category codes (a classification of level of study) and NZSCED field of study assigned to qualifications.  As a result, a number of qualifications had their level and field of study revised.  The effect of this saw between 1,000 and 2,000 enrolments a year being reclassified from type 'D' to type 'C'.  Currently only records known as 'Type D' are included in enrolments.  These relate to students enrolled in formal qualifications of more than one week's equivalent full-time study.  Non-formal enrolments and formal enrolments of a week or less equivalent full-time study are excluded.  Hence, those recoded to type 'C' are now out of scope and not included in this year's supply.  Many students previously coded to level 1-3 certificates have now been reclassified as level 4 certificates, or level 5-7 diplomas.  The change does not affect completions but impacts on higher-level progression rates.

A major review of individual student identifiers, and the data matching process to assign these, was also undertaken during the year.  As part of the tertiary reforms introduced by the government in 2006, there was a need to have better information on the attrition, completion, and progression rates for each individual institution.  As well, there was an apparent discontinuity in system completion and attrition rates using “individual student identifiers” (based on Ministry matching processes) before 2003 with rates from 2003 onwards which used the National Student Number (NSN).  Both these factors made it essential that the Ministry of Education review the data matching methodology.  The availability of four years of NSN data was able to provide a powerful independent means to measure the accuracy of the matching, and to revise the processes used.  The methodology was extensively reviewed in 2007 and “individual student identifiers” were regenerated for all existing enrolments and completions data from 1994.