<p>Collegehelp. A friendly suggestion.</p>
<p>I agree with your impulse to use S&E grads as a denominator and to figure in the effect of SAT midpoint as a proxy for value added. But by using the sum in the denominator you unfairly penalize small institutions. For example an institution with 100 phd’s and 500 S&E grads and midpoint of 1500 give you an index of .05. But a smaller institution with 50 Phd’s and 50 S&E grads with the same midpoint yields a ratio of .032. Clearly the smaller institution is doing a better job of producing PhD’s.</p>
<p>A better measure might be to first divide by the number of S&E grads. Then take these ratios and multiply them by some weighting factor ( such as 1600 divided by the SAT midpoint) that would account for the value added.</p>