<p>“What explains the six-year graduation rate differential?” </p>
<p>US News computes a “predicted graduation rate” statistic, I imagine they derive this via multiple regression analysis across the institutions.
The variables they say they use for this are related to incoming students stats and insitutional finances. I have to assume those are the categories of explanatory variables that they’ve found produce the highest R-squared.</p>
<p>"…engineering majors and hard science majors are a disproportionally large fraction of the student body at Cornell. "</p>
<p>True, that. And these areas have more objective, less “squishy” grading. Though the others are buried within CAS mostly, the cutoffs for engineering Dean’s List are visible and lower, suggesting more stringent grading policies. This was certainly the case in the past, I’m sure of that.</p>
<p>“Columbia (18%)” Probably lower, because you probably omitted Columbia’s College of General Studies which has a liberal arts curriculum with no engineering majors.</p>