What statistics that would be available to me should give me a good general idea of a school?
For fit, look at all the comments on your other post.
For merit aid, look for schools where your stats put you in the top 25% or so of students.
Oh, I didn’t mean merit aid by merit. I didn’t realize that was a term. I’ll change my original post.
Try reading a verbal description in a college guide like Fiske instead of looking at statistics.
Read Fiske and Google the Common Data Set for the college.
One stat that is very meaningful in my opinion is how many freshman go on to be sophmores at a particular school.
It might also be worthwhile looking at what percentage of students graduate within 4, 5 and 6 years. It can indicate how much support students get in meeting their requirements. Note, though, that when you compare the schools it may vary by type of school. Public Us can have lower numbers due to things like the student having trouble affording school, taking more time to work, etc.
One that’s been important for my family is the percentage of students who receive institutional aid. (I found it on collegeniavigator.gov )
Measurements of admission selectivity and financial resources seem to correlate rather strongly with various other measurements used to assess academic quality or prestige.
This doesn’t mean that rich, highly selective colleges are necessarily the best choice for everyone (or even everyone who can afford them and get admitted). It doesn’t mean there aren’t under-performers among these schools, or over-performers among less selective, less wealthy colleges. However, it is difficult to isolate the under- and over- performers based only on one or a a few other measurements. Bear in mind, too, that there are different ways to measure factors like admission selectivity and financial resources. Nevertheless, you could use something as simple as average test scores to isolate, very roughly, an initial set of relatively strong schools where you’d have a realistic shot at admission.
Opinions vary as to how informative (or reliable) almost any of these measurements really are.
Another thing to keep in mind is that, for many different measurements, we may not have a very good understanding of how much difference there really is between the #M college and the #N college. For many people, it may be the case that the Sears Good, Sears Better, and Sears Best washers all do a good enough job of cleaning your clothes, so you may as well just pick based on price.
The high school counselor assessment score in USNWR isn’t a bad statistic in that it seems somewhat independent of the overall rankings. For example, the 93rd ranked Reed receives a high rating (4.3).
Admission yield (easy to calculate) is another, though comparisons should be kept among colleges of a similar type. Among private colleges, where the competition can be both numerous and formidable, 30% or higher is respectable for this statistic.
Note that by alumni giving rate, liberal arts colleges as a class generate more loyalty than universities.
Agree that freshman retention rate is important. Schools performing well in this area retain nearly all (over 90%) of their first-year students.
Usually, I’d be inclined to think that is a bad metric for metrics.
I would expect good statistics to be mutually corroborating.
The burden of proof, I would think, would be on the outliers to show that for some reason they are truer indicators.
Reed College is a fairly unusual case because the school administration refuses on principle to cooperate with US News. In this case, I’d agree the GCs seem to be must closer to The Truth than the other US News factors.
Both of these numbers do tend to correlate with admission selectivity, since stronger students are more likely to stay in school and graduate. However, some schools over or under perform the expected (based on admission selectivity) retention and graduation rates; in such cases, it may be worth investigating why.
From a general statistical perspective, I would agree with you tk. However, in USNWR’s case, the rankings themselves may have begun to influence their own components, particularly the PA score. Let me call the HSCAS “interesting,” then, to be on safer statistical ground.
If you are willing to ignore the unfair title, then Business Insider’s “The 610 Smartest Colleges in America” can be consulted for a list of schools in order of their standardized test scores. Note that test-optional colleges (footnoted) are likely to be inflated in position.
The Ivies have high admission yields … but so, too, do BYU, Liberty University, the University of Alaska, and North Dakota State. Colleges can have high yields because they are excellent schools that appeal to good students all over the country. Or, they can have high yields because they appeal to niche populations.
Graduation rates are tricky, too. Academic rigor may be driving down graduation rates in some cases. MIT, Rice, and Reed have lower 4y rates than some of their peers.
I have a harder time imagining that a college could maintain high average test scores year after year, for decades, if it weren’t academically strong. Maybe there are a few super prestigious schools that do attract many top students even though their classroom instruction isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. If so, even those schools must be doing something else right to maintain their reputations.
“Academic rigor may be driving down graduation rates in some cases.” (#14)
I agree. In these cases, to the extent that they can be identified, graduation/retention rates may not be a worthwhile indicator of quality.
To be perfectly honest, while many of us tend to try to use the statistics to justify our own decisions, the statistics are only useful in looking at the schools’ performance in aggregate. Statistics will tell you nothing about how that school will perform for you. Raw data, such as it is, does not explain WHY the number are what they are…
For example, someone mentioned above the students going from Freshman to Sophomore at a particular school. A low number there could be due to the school taking chances on lower stat students that cannot handle the work or the school may have poor professors in the freshman classes. The are thousands of individual decisions that go into it. Typically, what you see with that stat is simply that the schools with better numbers tend to have smarter students with deeper pockets (personal or scholarship pockets in this case). If you are bright student, many of the reason this stat may be lower at a school has zero to do with you and simply is meaningless.
Selectivity, yield, etc. are all statistics that are effectively meaningless because they can be manipulated and really boil down to how popular the school is in the opinion of those who applied and/or entered the school.
The best advice I can give is that you figure out what is really important to you. Narrow the choices down and visit schools. Use statistics to calculate things that factor into what is important. If you want smaller cities, or class sizes or student bodies, football championships…those types of things can be helpful insomuch as they are important to you. Otherwise, the data tend to be a bunch of clutter. Good Luck!
I’ve found the metrics on the princeton review site to be useful – things like academic rating, professors interesting rating, professors accessible rating, quality of life rating, etc. They’re based on student surveys, and probably have high error bars, but at least it’s something you can grab on to as a quality metric that isn’t driven just by selectivity.
Something that’s helpful is checking what percentage of freshman live on campus. If it’s a low number, that usually means that a ton of freshman are living at home with their parents and commuting to school. Schools that have a lot of these kids are usually considered to be rather dull socially.
Some colleges do place a larger or smaller emphasis on test scores (or heavily test-score-based status like National Merit) for admissions (or scholarships). Such larger or smaller emphasis on test scores may cause a college to have its overall selectivity (and hence its reputation) slightly overrated or underrated if one looks too much at test scores to compare selectivity (which is often done, since college do not report HS GPA and rank in a consistent manner that can be compared between them, and there is even less information for comparison of HS course selection and rigor among applicants and admits to different colleges).