Unpaid Tuition Balances at Community Colleges: An Exploratory Analysis Delinquent Tuition Debt and Graduation
The rising cost of higher education has led to increased tuition costs for students and their families, forcing more students to secure larger amounts of debt to finance their educational pursuits. Although scholars have explored how student loan debt accumulation influences higher education persistence and graduation, an unexplored area of higher education finance and debt is the relationship between unpaid tuition balances on community college student graduation. This analysis attempts to illuminate this gap by utilizing a unique institutional dataset with data from the National Student Clearinghouse to analyze the relationship between unpaid tuition balances and postsecondary graduation for community college students. Results suggest that having an outstanding tuition balance dramatically decreases the likelihood of graduation 3 years out from the unpaid balance. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.