A growing number of students are earning undergraduate degrees within four years from the University of Hawaii’s flagship Manoa campus, an improvement university officials attribute to better academic support.

UH-Manoa’s four-year graduation rate climbed by 10 percentage points to 27.9 percent this year from 17.5 percent in 2010, reflecting the number of students who completed a bachelor’s degree within four years. Meanwhile, the number of students completing bachelor’s degrees within six years also increased, to 57.1 percent this year from 48.6 percent in 2010.

“These improvements are a result of enacting a strategic priority of building a Manoa community in support of student success,” UH-Manoa Chancellor Robert Bley-Vroman said in a statement.

Under federal reporting guidelines, the rates track full-time students enrolling as freshmen.

By comparison, the national graduation rates have increased by roughly 3 percentage points over five years. But Manoa’s rates still trail the national average. Nationally, 39.4 percent of students who enrolled at a four-year college in 2007 graduated within four years and 59.4 percent graduated within six years, according to the most recent data available from the National Center for Education Statistics.

As UH-Manoa’s graduation rates have increased, so has the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded. The campus — which enrolled 13,616 undergraduate students this fall — awarded 3,404 bachelor’s degrees in 2014-15, up 15 percent from the 2,957 bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2010-11, according to data from the university’s Institutional Research and Analysis Office.

University officials say Manoa has implemented various strategies to boost its graduation rates in recent years,including increasing the availability of classes, encouraging students to declare a major more quickly and increasing access to academic advisers.

The university also has implemented a so-called degree audit system that maps a student’s academic progress toward a specific degree. The online system features a “what if” function for students considering changing their major.

Another initiative, launched in 2011, is the “15 to Finish” campaign that encourages students to take 15 or more credits per semester to graduate on time. A typical bachelor’s degree program requires 120 credits, or an average of 15 credits each during fall and spring semesters to finish in four years. Last fall, more than 63 percent of freshmen at Manoa took on course loads totaling 15 or more credits, up from 61 percent of freshmen the year before.

Over the summer, the Associated Students of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, which represents undergraduate students, passed a resolution commending the administration for the improved support for students. The resolution noted, for one, that the number of unsuccessful class-registration attempts has fallen significantly from 29,251 unsuccessful attempts in fall 2009 to 2,317 failed attempts last fall.

“(In 2009) the average student was unable to get into more than two courses students needed to take, indicating that close to half of the courses taken by students were second choices, affecting students’ time to graduate,” the ASUH resolution says. “In Fall 2014, the number of unsuccessful registrations dropped drastically.”

The gains seen at Manoa have yet to translate to UH’s two other four-year campuses. In 2014, 40 percent of undergraduate students at UH-West Oahu completed a bachelor’s degree within six years, while 38 percent finished in six years at UH-Hilo.

At Hawaii’s private universities, Hawaii Pacific University has a 40 percent six-year graduation rate; Chaminade’s is 37 percent; and Brigham Young University-Hawaii’s is at 47 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard website.

A school’s six-year rate is more commonly available because the federal Student Right to Know Act requires colleges receiving federal funds to disclose the number of students who complete their program “within 150 percent of normal time,” or six years for a four-year program.