College graduation rates are up — in fact, they’re at the highest point in 12 years. New data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center shows that more than 60% of students who started working toward a degree in 2018 have finished. The real success story here: community colleges offering two-year degrees.

When Rebecca Hansen graduated high school, college wasn’t in the cards. She became a cosmetologist instead.

“My dad was like, ‘This is great. When are you starting college?’ And I was like, ‘This is it, Dad. I’m never going to college. Like, this is my career,'” she said.

But when the youngest of her four kids started school five years ago, she enrolled in a community college to study to become a therapist.

“It just developed me into a much stronger mother, wife and community member,” she said.

Hansen is part of a wave of people heading to community colleges and earning their degrees.

Doug Shapiro with the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center cited two reasons behind the trend. No. 1: The sharp decline in enrollment tied to the pandemic was a wakeup call for community colleges.

“They needed to focus a lot more on supporting kind of the students that remained and helping them stay on track to graduation,” he said.

And No. 2: There has been major growth in dual enrollment. “That means high school students who are taking college classes while still in high school,” Shapiro said. “Their completion rates are much higher.”

Shapiro expects both of these things to continue and completion rates to keep rising.

That’s promising news, said Bill DeBaun at the advocacy group National College Attainment Network, but there’s context to consider. At four-year institutions, more than 60% of students graduate within six years.

On the other hand, “the community college sector here is still at 43% completion. There’s still a lot more room to grow,” he said.

And even though completion rates are up, enrollment has fallen from its peak in 2010.

“We do need to think about whether we are getting enough students to start in the first place so that they can benefit from the increased completion outcomes we observe in this data,” DeBaun said.

He said enrollment of 18-year-olds is down too, and when high school graduates don’t start college immediately, there’s a much lower chance they ever will.