<p>modestmelody: In a democracy, transparency is always a good thing, especially transparency in powerful institutions such as colleges and universities.</p>
<p>I was very happy to learn that my daughter’s first choice school, a tiny LAC, places two-thirds of its graduates in graduate or professional schools, that just over ten percent of a recent class applied to law school, and that, of that approximately ten percent who applied, 95% were enrolled in law school their first year after graduation (and, therefore, at least 95% necessarily were admitted to law school).</p>
<p>Because my daughter wants to go to law school or graduate school, it’s important that the undergraduate school she selects out of high school leads there. Her chosen LAC’s success makes it easier for her to choose to go there rather than to the household name flagship state university where she’d be one of fifty thousand.</p>
<p>It would be nice if other schools disclosed as much information about their success in placing students in postgraduate programs as my daughter’s choice LAC. That way, we’d be more able (I don’t claim we’d be perfectly able) to compare colleges and universities other than on the basis of name recognition.</p>
<p>Disclosing entering SAT/ACT scores in a way that are linked to postgraduate school admissions lets in-coming students and their parents assess their chances of postgraduate school admission after spending four years at the particular institution.</p>
<p>For example, if 75% of the students at UG school A who scored 700/700/700 on the SAT get admitted to top 15 law schools, that is a strong indication that top 15 law schools like the kind of student produced by UG school A. More importantly, it is a good indication that if your kid has a 700/700/700 SAT score and puts forth similar effort at UG school A, there’s a good chance your kid will also get admitted to a top 15 law school as well.</p>
<p>Maybe a more important disclosure would be UG school B, which never has placed a 700/700/700 student in a top 15 law school. That strongly suggests that your 700/700/700 scoring kid might have a bit of a problem getting into a top 15 law school after four years at UG school B.</p>
<p>Those two scenarios (both understandably unlikely) do not definitively speak to the relative quality of UG school A and UG school B, but they do provide a basis for choosing one school over the other if attending a top 15 law school is one’s desire.</p>
<p>Public companies are required to publish their financial results of operations. Colleges and universities ought to be required to publish the results of their educational operations.</p>