Alva Review-Courier -

What's the graduation rate of Alva incentive scholarship recipients? That's a question Councilmember Joe Parsons asked when the Northwestern Oklahoma State University Foundation presented their last scholarship invoice. NWOSU President Dr. Bo Hannaford promised he'd get that information and report back to the Alva City Council.

Monday night, Hannaford was on the agenda to do just that. He said data was pulled for the most recent 2017 cohort and the 2015 cohort. These are students who begin college in that year. In the 2017 group, 303 Alva scholarships were awarded. For 2015 there were 341. Of course, not all students in the cohort received Alva scholarships.

Hannaford said the graduation rate for each cohort after four years was about 60 percent. One was 56 percent and the other 58 percent. Looking at the data another way, for graduation after three years or more, the rate was 81 percent and 75 percent.

"When I started digging into the data and asked our folks to generate on both cohorts, we looked at how long they were staying and graduating," said Hannaford. "In one cohort we had 81 percent who took three years or longer for graduation, and the other one was 75 percent for three years or more. So not only are we getting that return on investment for the year you're giving this scholarship, most of these students are going to be staying two to, some of them, maybe five more years. For both classes it took 60 percent four years for graduation.

"It was good for us to look at that. I think it's something that probably every three to four years we'll start pulling more cohorts and see if we're making progress on that rate."