North Carolina released its first four-year cohort graduation rates today, showing that 68.1 percent of the 2002-03 ninth graders graduated from high school in four years or less.
Since the fall of 2002, North Carolina public school officials have been keeping a careful accounting of each ninth grader as he or she moves through high school. The goal of this record keeping, a four-year cohort graduation rate, provides the state with its first actual count of how many students graduate with a diploma in four years.