<p>The</a> Dartmouth - Graduation rates differ significantly across race</p>
<p>According to this article in The Dartmouth, UChicago has a 80% grad rate for African Americans over 6 years in 2011, compared to 85% at Dartmouth and 91% at Columbia. </p>
<p>Are these numbers accurate? If so, any ideas why UChicago's grad rate for African Americans is so low?</p>
<p>Good question. First point to make is 80% is not really low, it’s just low compared to certain other institutions. For example, Howard University, which is a HBCU (Historically Black College / University) has a 6 year graduation rate for all students of 63% (source: Howard University admissions web site).</p>
<p>If these numbers are accurate, then the fact that UChicago’s graduation rate is lower than the other two schools cited above can be attributed to a number of things I guess. Perhaps UChicago accepts relatively lesser qualified students. Perhaps UChicago does not have a lot of “easy” course work to hide these less qualified students in. Perhaps the UChicago “support structure” for these students is not quite as strong.</p>
<p>In any event, I go back to my original point which is that 80% is not bad, though 90% would of course be better and the University ought to make that it’s goal, or higher, again if the numbers above are accurate.</p>
<p>One question I would have: If the Common Data Set conventions are being used, there is no adjustment for students who transfer to a different institution. Those students are treated as if they failed to graduate. And although in the last few years Chicago has had very few students transfer out, prior to 2009 or so there was some significant transfer attrition every year, which was hardly limited to minority students. So the “low graduation rate” for African-American students as of 2011 may well be, at least in part, a “high successful transfer” rate.</p>
<p>It would be very unusual, compared to peer colleges, if African-American graduation rates, however calculated, weren’t somewhat lower than the average for everyone. That’s just the world. But I highly doubt that 20% of African American students are failing out of the University of Chicago, and transferring to MIT or Stanford isn’t the same thing.</p>
<p>Kaukauna, I was referring to UChicago’s standing relative to its peers, not based on the nationwide grad rate average. </p>
<p>JHS, you raise some very good points, but I’m not sure I’m buying your proposition. Based on recent statistics, for those who started at UChicago in 2006, 86% graduated in four years (Comparable to Harvard, Princeton, Swarthmore, etc.). I imagine then, even starting in 2006, the grad rate in 6 years was even higher - probably 90-92%. </p>
<p>You can see the stats here: [Highest</a> 4-Year Graduation Rates | Rankings | US News](<a href=“http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/highest-grad-rate/page+2]Highest”>http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/highest-grad-rate/page+2)</p>
<p>UChicago’s high transfer-out rate started going down in the early 2000s. </p>
<p>So, if starting in 2006, probably about 90%+ students graduated in six years, I’m still unclear why the grad rate for African Americans is significantly lower than that, at 80%.</p>
<p>There are two elements at work here. </p>
<p>First, there is the overall graduation rate. As of the class that entered in 2006, Chicago’s 6-year graduation rate for everyone is still slightly below that of peer institutions. According to NCES data, it had an overall 92% 6-year graduation rate for that cohort. Harvard was at 97%, Princeton 96%, Yale 95%, Stanford 95%, Duke 95%, Cornell 93%, Penn 96%, Columbia 95%, Dartmouth 96%, Northwestern 93%, Brown 95%.</p>
<p>Then, there’s the question whether African-American students graduated at a lower than average rate. At Chicago, they did, in that cohort at least, but only by 4% – the six-year graduation rate was 88% vs. 92% average. A number of the peer colleges I looked at had similar gaps – Princeton had a 6% difference (90% vs. 96%), Columbia 5% (90% vs. 95%), Northwestern 5% (88% vs. 93%), Stanford 4% (91% vs. 95%), Cornell 3% (90% vs. 93%), Penn 3% (93% vs. 96%), Brown 3% (92% vs. 95%), Yale 3% (93% vs. 96%). The others had smaller or no such gaps. On the whole, I think that’s a pretty good job by this entire group, including Chicago, although some seem to do a little better than others. (I know from the Dartmouth article that Dartmouth’s numbers have varied a lot year-to-year. The same is probably true of many of the colleges, including Chicago, but I could only easily compare everyone’s numbers for the 2006 entering cohort.)</p>
<p>So you can tell two stories from these numbers. You can say that Chicago (tied with Northwestern) has the lowest 6-year graduation rate for African-American students out of the group of elite colleges I looked at. That would be correct, although the difference is only a few percentage points vs. where most of the others are. Or you can say that Chicago has the lowest 6-year graduation rate of the group (by a few percentage points), largely due to the fact that 5-6 years ago it still had a few more transfers-out than the others, and that the gap between the rate for its African-American students and its average rate was more or less typical for this group of colleges. And that would also be correct.</p>
<p>For a reality check, I looked at the equivalent numbers for the 2006 (class of 2010) cohort at a number of well-regarded public universities. I will give the overall 6-year graduation rate first, and the rate for African American students second:</p>
<p>Berkeley: 91% - 77%
UCLA: 92% - 78%
Michigan: 91% - 80%
Virginia: 93% - 86%
N. Carolina: 89% - 83%
Washington: 81% - 73%
Penn State: 86% - 69%</p>
<p>It looks like the average graduation rate at the most elite of these is pretty comparable to that at the top privates, just a little bit lower, but none of them does as good a job of bringing African-American students up to the norm as any of the top privates, and many of them do really quite a bit worse. There are lots of reasons for that, of course, and they are not all bad – the privates may not be taking enough risks and giving enough chances.</p>
<p>Edited to add: If, with the group of private elites, I had included MIT (93% - 84%) or Williams (96% - 83%), I could no longer have said that Chicago had the lowest graduation rate for African-Americans, and I might have said that its 4% gap was less than half of the highest such gaps in the group.</p>
<p>JHS,</p>
<p>Thanks for the info. Where are you getting the 88% grad rate in 6 years for African Americans at UChicago? The Dartmouth article had the grad rate for UChicago African Americans at 80%, not 88%, for the cohort starting in 2006. </p>
<p>(Also, indeed, the 6 year grad rate at UChicago seems to be 92% starting with the 2006 cohort. I imagine that grad rate will increase considerably - probably to 95-96% with more recent classes, as freshman retention seems to be quite high. Perhaps the tide will rise all boats here and African American retention will increase too.)</p>
<p>The Dartmouth article used 2005/2011 numbers for everyone except Dartmouth. I think the Dartmouth article was based on an academic article which was written before the 2006/2012 numbers became available.The year-to-year differences were pretty big for many of the colleges. Dartmouth was at 85% for 2011, vs. 95% in 2012, Harvard went from 94% to 97%, and Princeton went from 94% to 90%. </p>
<p>I got my numbers off the National Center for Education Statistics “College Navigator” site, which is super for stuff like this, but for graduation rate by race/ethnicity all it has is 2006/2012 numbers. Those are still the most recent, though it will probably update to 2007/2013 in a month or two. The historical data sets exist, and are public, but I don’t have any idea how to access them easily.</p>
<p>Are all of these differences even statistically significant?</p>
<p>Also, is there a way to control for other factors? Or does this data even tell us the story that we think it’s telling? For example, the low graduation rates could have more to do with students who leave the College to take care of sensitive family issues (I saw this happen on a variety of occasions) and much less to do with academic ability or general emotional readiness.</p>
<p>I’d love to see more people do studies like these not just along racial lines but along family income/ need-based financial aid. Does anyone know if there’s any public data available for Uchicago and its peer schools?</p>