The College Enrollment by High School report shows the number of Michigan public high school graduates who enrolled in a college or university, displayed by high school graduation year. The report specifies whether students first enroll in two-year or four-year institutions and how soon they enroll after graduating from high school.
The report also lets users explore how variables such as gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status affect college enrollment. Users can view actual numbers as well as percentages, and see year-to-year enrollment trends.
Six-month data for the report are updated in winter. School-year data are updated in the spring. See the Recently Posted Reports page for when the report was last updated.
Historical Changes
- October 2013: CEPI refined how enrollments are calculated to more closely align with other postsecondary reports.
- Fall 2014: CEPI refined rules counting the first school a student enrolled in. Because of this, if you generated a report before fall 2014, it may not match reports generated after.
- For example, before fall 2014, a student who enrolled in a community college within 6 months of graduating high school and also enrolled in a 4-year university within 12 months of graduating high school would only be counted in the 4-year university. This caused community college enrollment by high school numbers to appear lower.
- Beginning with the 2018-19 school year, independent colleges with TIP or PELL grant recipients began reporting in the STARR Collection. Because of this change, independent colleges may be more frequently represented in the data than in prior years, which may result in trend changes.
- NSC data are used to locate data for out-of-state or non-STARR participating schools. Prior to the 2018-19 school year, NSC data were also used to fully supplement colleges participating in the STARR collection. Beginning with 2018-19, NSC data are used to supplement Michigan STARR reporting schools only if student data are present for an institution in an academic year where no STARR data are present at the same institution for that student.
- Rule changes and data revisions received over time can cause isolated scenarios where student enrollment counts or percents appear to decrease over time, when cumulative increases would be the expectation.
Use the Location and Report Settings to select a location, graduation year, college type, time to enrollment and report category. Data can be filtered by categories such as race/ethnicity, gender, race/ethnicity by gender, economically disadvantaged, English learners, homeless, and students with disabilities.
Data view options include:
- Snapshot (a graph and table of the selected data)
- Trend (a graph and table showing changes over time)
- Entity Breakdown (a table shows the data for the selected entity and related entities; if you’ve selected a particular district, the Entity Breakdown would show data for that district, ISD and individual buildings within the district)
See the MI School Data Quick Start Guide for the basics of navigating the site and customizing a report.
Location Options
Locations Setting options: Statewide, ISD, District and School
Logged-in Users
Users with secure access who are logged in can see unsuppressed numbers for the entities for which they have been specifically authorized.
CEPI and the National Student Clearinghouse collect the data used to complete this report. The databases used include:
- CEPI’s Student Transcript and Academic Record Repository Collection in MSDS, to locate IHE enrollment in a Michigan public community college or university. For more information on the MSDS application and reporting rules, please see the STARR Data Collection Manual and/or the MSDS Collection Details Manual on the CEPI website.
- The NSC StudentTracker database, to locate enrollment from out-of-state or non-STARR participating colleges or universities.
High school graduates identified in the MSDS are matched against the STARR Collection and national college enrollment data from the NSC StudentTracker. Michigan acquires StudentTracker records by a matching process which includes the first name, middle name, last name, suffix, and date of birth. If a student’s name or date of birth in the StudentTracker database doesn’t exactly match the state’s graduation record, a match may not be made. Another limitation is that most, but not all, colleges and universities provide data to NSC. Both situations can result in lower enrollment totals.
Data are collected from high schools after the high school year closes, and are matched against college enrollments after at least six months have elapsed. For example, college enrollment data for the high school class of 2009-10 were first captured in the 2011-12 college school year, and were included beginning in CEPI’s 2012 report updates.
The number of months to enrollment is cumulative. That is, students who enroll in college within 6 months of graduation will be reflected in all subsequent month categories (0-6, 0-12, 0-16, 0-24, 0-36 and 0-48 months). When no data are presented for a given time frame category, it’s likely because the time frame has not yet elapsed since the graduation year. For example, 0-48 month enrollments did not show up for the 2010-11 graduation year until 2014-15, after 48 months have elapsed.
Not every instance of college enrollment is counted in this report. For example, students participating in dual enrollment or Early/Middle College programs have not yet graduated high school and are not included in this report. Only once a student earns their high school diploma does the report follow these high school graduates into postsecondary enrollment.
Demographic categories are based on the student’s high school record.
The report is updated annually in the fall and winter. The “within 6 months of graduation” timeframe is first updated in December/January for the current year’s high school graduation class from data provided by NSC StudentTracker. These metrics are subject to change in the “within 12 months” timeframe, after incorporating the next year’s worth of STARR data.
Other college enrollment numbers might not always align across reports on MI School Data. This is because these data were updated at different times. The numbers best reflect what was available at the time of the run of the report.
If you have questions not addressed here or in the linked resources, please contact CEPI customer support at cepi@michigan.gov.
Disclosure Avoidance
To protect the privacy of individual students, CEPI applies data suppression rules to sensitive data when report settings would yield fewer than 10 students in a given group. Complementary groups may also be suppressed. In some cases, values less than 10 may be shown when there is no risk of identifying individual students. Secure users can log in to view unsuppressed data for their authorized location. Please see How CEPI Protects Education Data for more information.
Report Labels
See the glossary for additional terms and acronyms used on MI School Data.
Data Calculations
% Enrolled in College = Total HS Graduates Enrolled in College/Total HS Graduates
Enrolled within X months = Number of months between high school exit date and the earliest enrollment date after high school graduation
