The Completion Gap Atlas
Completion rates are reported everywhere and understood almost nowhere. The Atlas assembles two decades of institution-level records into a single comparable panel, then makes the gaps navigable.
Where do completion gaps actually open, and how much of the variation is institutional rather than compositional?
Boards and state systems set completion targets without knowing whether their peers' numbers are comparable to theirs. The Atlas gives them a defensible baseline and a peer set they did not choose themselves.
Key findings
of completion variation remains after adjusting for entering student composition
institutions in the harmonised panel, 2003 through 2025
state agencies and system offices using the tool in its first quarter
About the project
The panel links institutional reporting to a harmonised set of student-cohort definitions, resolving the definitional churn that makes year-over-year comparison unreliable at most institutions.
Roughly 62% of the observed variation in six-year completion survives conditioning on entering student composition. That residual is the part institutions can plausibly move, and it is where the Atlas focuses attention.
The public tool launched in March 2026 and has been used by 41 state agencies and system offices in its first quarter.