<p>Chris: Is there a reliable source for statistics on the various SUNY schools' (a) average freshman class size, and (b) retention and graduation rates.</p>
<p>Good question. I don't think you're going to find freshman class size broken out, because schools don't track that. I'll poke around the SUNY site and see what I can find. I'll give you warnings on both of those stats, though, which I think are both really quite misleading.</p>
<p>First, average class size is usually calculated by taking the number of class sections divided by the number of spots in those classes. That means any school with things like music lessons is going to have skewed numbers, since that throws a lot of 1s in there. Second, like I said, I don't think anybody breaks it down by year, because most classes are open to just about everyone. You'll have seniors in a 100-level class who are fulfilling a last-minute graduation requirement, so it's hard to grasp that as a reliable number.</p>
<p>Retention rate is important; it's a good number, and a good indication of what's going on around campus. Graduation rate, however, sucks as a metric. I used to work at SUNY Old Westbury, and when I started there in 2000, the graduation rate was nine percent. That's right, nine. But there were waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too many factors at play there that made that stat irrelevant: the number of adult and part-time students, the number of incoming and outgoing transfers every year, and the fact that that number was from incoming freshman classes four to six years earlier, which had a VERY different -- and significantly lower -- academic profile than the ones we were admitting for the Fall 2001 semester. So that number was a really terrible indicator of what our students were doing at that time. It was a nice indicator of what the class was like six years ago, but you're not going to school in 2002, you're going to school in 2008. And you should compare yourself with students who are there today, not students who were on campus before you even thought about college.</p>
<p>Again, good question; I'm going to put it up on my blog.</p>
<p>-Chris</p>