"Four-year colleges may face a loss of up to 20 percent in fall enrollment, SimpsonScarborough, a higher education research and marketing company, has predicted on the basis of multiple student surveys it has conducted.
The findings are based on surveys of more than 2,000 college-bound high school seniors and current college students in March, just after the coronavirus began spreading in the United States, and in April, after three weeks of record unemployment claims.
The findings are based on several surveys, one of which was released previously.
Ten percent of college-bound seniors who had planned to enroll at a four-year college before the COVID-19 outbreak have already made alternative plans.
Fourteen percent of college students said they were unlikely to return to their current college or university in the fall, or it was 'too soon to tell.' Exactly three weeks later, in mid-April, that figure had gone up to 26 percent." ...
There is a major problem with the survey of high school seniors, from which they got the 10% figure: 64% were varsity athletes. That is NOT a representative sample, and any conclusions are, therefore, not representative of graduating seniors.
They did not demonstrate that they controlled for this, nor did they speak to this at all. This is bad research.
That may seem like a high percentage to you only if you’re only familiar with gigantic suburban HS’s. At smaller HS’s, often times, all it takes to become a varsity athlete is to regularly show up to practice for a sport (and there are a lot of small HS’s around this country). In fact, at those smaller schools, coaches may recruit completely unathletic kids for a sport just so that they can form a team.
What is peculiar about that survey is that 3/4th of the respondents are female.
Still, I doubt that survey is orders of magnitude off.
@PurpleTitan That’s still a 9% difference based off decade-old data. Any student in AP stat would see that the methodology and sample sizes of the original article are unreliable. Also, the US news article says “plays a sport” not is a varsity athlete. So this includes club and JV sports.
@izrk02, I fail to see how that 9% would make a big difference in conclusions.
No, that survey sample isn’t completely representative. Nitpicking aside, if you’ve taken AP Stats, can you then explain to me how big an impact that would have on conclusions and why?
@PurpleTitan The estimated HS population of the US is around 15 million. Taking basic common sense into account, a survey of 2000 students is in no way representative of that population. That’s around .01% of the population. Not only that, but the surveys didn’t actually get responses from 2000 students. The article is about multiple surveys, which added together add up to 2000 responses. Each survey individually has around 500 response, with the first one having 500 from HS students and 500 from college students.
Other problems:
The first survey mentioned does not discuss how the survey was conducted and shared with respondents.
The survey with parents was shared on Facebook and was optional. They even acknowledge in the results that “the flaws in a Facebook survey – probably a sample that is wealthier and whiter than the general population – make the survey sample more indicative of those populations.”