Appreciate all the feedback, which brings me to a couple of questions.
- On College Navigator, on the Retention & Graduation Rates section, part of it looks like this (this is New Mexico Highlands, source):
My reading is that 25% of students graduated within the designated time span and that 37% of the students transferred out and then that the remaining 38% of students either dropped out or are on a longer pathway toward graduation. Is my reading correct?
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Okay, the graduation rate has some issues, presumably, across nearly all schools, or at least across nearly all public schools. Thus, would looking at a graduation performance rate index (i.e. actual vs. projected) still be a fair comparison, as the numbers would be similarly flawed for everyone? Or would this be a case of garbage in, garbage out?
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Is there some kind of metric that is publicly available that people think would be useful at assessing a university’s effectiveness? I’ve read of colleges doing the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CSA) as a sort of pre-test/post-test for the first years and seniors, but schools generally don’t publish the results of those tests.
I guess I’m continuing on my my never-ending quest to find ways to assess the quality of a school, as I don’t think that major newspaper/magazine rankings have typically done a great job of capturing that. (For more on what my ideal ranking might look like, see post #2 over here: Create Your Dream College Ranking Methodology)