New York Lags Behind Other Cities in College Graduation Rate

By PATRICK MCGEEHAN

College graduation rates in New York City are so low that more of the city's residents who have college degrees were born abroad than in New York, a report released on Thursday shows.

The report, published by the city comptroller's office, found that despite the city's reputation as a magnet for college graduates, only 42 percent of its residents have degrees from two-year or four-year colleges. That share placed New York sixth among the 10 biggest cities in America, the report found.

Comptroller John C. Liu, who is expected to run for mayor next year, had his staff conduct the study as part of “Beyond High School NYC,” which he said would be an initiative to find ways to increase the share of city residents with college degrees to 60 percent by 2025. Doing so would put the city on par with the level of education in Washington and Seattle, the report shows.

First, Mr. Liu said, the city would need to raise the graduation rate for its secondary students. Only 21 percent of New York City students obtain a college degree within 12 years of entering high school, according to the report.

Of the 1.9 million city residents with college degrees, almost 40 percent were born in other countries. And, contrary to the popular notion that the city is flooded with new college graduates every spring, only about 1 of every 60 college graduates in the city came from a neighboring state and only an additional 5 of those 60 came from elsewhere in the country.

By comparison, the five big cities with higher concentrations of college graduates â€" Washington, Boston, San Francisco, Minneapolis and Seattle â€" drew about one-fourth of their college graduates from beyond their neighboring states.

“If New York City were to approximate the educational attainment of the five most-educated cities, 
it would need to have more than 630,000 additio nal college degree-holders among its resident population,” says the report, which was written by Frank Braconi, the comptroller's chief economist.

Improving high-school graduation rates would be an important step toward that goal, the report states, though it does not lay out any suggestions for how that would be accomplished or how much it would cost.