I read in lot of post to look common data set. I googled it for colleges but not sure what to look for. What I am confused is what to look for. what are the most important points in common data set that people must focus on, and what points must be just for a nice consideration, and what points are not important and could be ignored, help appreciated.
It depends on what you want to know. Take a look at one. Admissions info, if that’s what you’re after, is located in section C.
You can learn a lot more detail than what you generally see written up in articles about college rankings. You get comprehensive statistics such as applicants and admissions for early decision/action and regular decision cycles, students by race/ethnic category, in-state and out of state, how may were admitted versus how many actually enrolled, waiting list admissions, SAT score ranges, relative importance of various factors in admissions decisions, detailed financial aid information, class sizes, and percentage of students pursuing each degree offered by the college.
I particularly liked the breakdown of class sizes. Instead of seeing the teacher/student ratios or average class size, you can actually see how many classes fall in each 10-point range of number of students. That was an important factor for my D. This info is way towards the end of the CDS.
For us, two metrics in section C were beneficial. First, DD had a good GPA and great service oriented ECs, but gets test anxiety and didn’t do well on either SAT nor ACT. That prompted us to look at test-optional schools. Section C identifies the number of students who were admitted without submitting standardized test scores. In addition, the common data sets also break out the acceptance rate for those doing early decision vs regular admission. That helped decide whether or not to go ED or to shop around for better merit/financial aid.
The CDS actually only provides overall admission rate and ED admission rate, but usually you can do the math to compute RD admission rate. For some schools there is a big difference; sometimes half the class or even more is coming in ED and it skews the overall admit rate.
I never found RD admission rates posted anywhere but using the CDS, I did the computations for each school D considered. Contrary to most on cc, we weren’t interested in any possible ED boost; we wanted to make sure what the real admit rate was for the remaining (RD) slots.
Other factors we were interested are in Section F of the CDS. What % of students reside on campus and the % in Greek organizations (that question is not always filled out).
You can also find info on number of students accepted off the wait list.
I look up things like what is important in admissions…like is Level of APplicant’s interest Important or only considered?
Or how many students were admitted off the waitlist.
Neeed based scholarships…what is the average amount
I used it to look up how important is demonstrated interest, how many students get non-need based aid, number of applicants and number of acceptances, wait list info.
The Common Data Set is an amazing wealth of information. Right now the information that I look for are:
- Females applied/admitted/enrolled
- Diversity breakdown
- Waitlist policy, number placed on wait list/accepted spot/eventually enrolled
- Importance placed on various factors in admissions
- 25% and 75% scores on SAT and ACT
- Early decision policy and numbers
- % Students OOS
- % Students in Sorority
- % of types of degrees conferred.
I see many questions posted on CC that are easily available of the CDS. “what is my chance of getting off the wait list?” “how many guys are in fraternities?” etc…
The waitlist numbers frustrate me, because it is SO helpful for the colleges that report it that it makes the colleges that do not report waitlist numbers all the more frustrating. Sometimes they will report how many got in off of the waitlist, but not the total offered waitlist or the total who accepted the waitlist offer. Not very helpful.
I do like to see the breakdown by gender. I often go to collegedata first because I think that they display the CDS data in a more user-friendly format, with the percentages already calculated for me. Collegedata info sometimes lags, though, so you’re best going to the college’s website to make sure you’re looking at the freshest numbers.
Two other things that can tell you quite a lot about a school:
- Four-, five-, and six-year graduation rates, in Part B. Low completion rates are a red flag.
- Bachelor's degrees conferred by area of study, in Part J. These vary quite considerably. Many might expect HYPS to be more or less interchangeable, for example. But the percentages of students graduating with degrees in engineering and computer science (combined total) are Stanford 36%,, Princeton 25%, Yale 12%, Harvard 10%. But in math it's Harvard 11%, Yale 5%, Stanford 4%, Princeton 2%, while in the social sciences it's Harvard 30%, Yale 28%, Princeton 19%, Stanford 13%. No doubt you can get an excellent education in just about any field at any of these super-elite schools, but these differences make for rather different campus cultures and communities.
@evergreen5 @ARTCC @alooknac @bopper @3goldensmom @19parent @ninakatarina @bclintonk
Thanks a lot each and everyone of you, this is very helpful. Thanks from the bottom of my heart.
Much of the common data set information is duplicated at http://www.collegedata.com , but some parts are not.
Low completion rates in relation to admission selectivity are a warning.
Obviously, more selective colleges tend to have higher completion rates, since stronger students are less likely to flunk out or have to take lighter course loads or have to repeat failed courses. But if a college has lower completion rates than others of similar admission selectivity, investigate why.
Some colleges have benign reasons for longer calendar time to graduation, such as a high percentage of students taking semesters or quarters off to do co-op jobs.
This is also found at https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/ , but in a more finely divided list of major categories.
Schools promote their data to show the their best possible statistics, not necessarily to be compared accurately among their peers. Are the SAT scores on their admissions page, mean, median, or the 25th to 75th percentile? Are they for the applicant student population, the accepted student population or the enrolled student population? The common data set levels the playing field.
What does the general community look like, will my child easily find peers? For high stat kids accepting a large merit scholarship, it helps to get a window into how many peers they will have at a particular school.
Even small and mid-sized schools used to draw a student body with a much wider range of scores. That’s in the old days of course before the application frenzy and longer distances from home to school. We always knew that there would be a few savants ruining the curve and many struggling students to contribute to the high drop out rate.
Kiplinger organizes some of the CDS information from many colleges into ranked, click-sortable lists.
https://www.kiplinger.com/tool/college/T014-S001-kiplinger-s-best-values-in-public-colleges/index.php
For example, if you click-sort on 4y graduation rates, you’ll see that schools near the top of the “private universities” table do tend to be much more selective than schools near the bottom. However, while Georgetown’s rate is 90%, Stanford’s is only 75%. Is that a red flag for Stanford? Maybe. But I suspect it is largely attributable to Stanford’s high percentage of engineering majors (or something like that). Each CDS statistic isn’t necessarily too meaningful on its face, in isolation (although the top-ranked, more selective schools do tend to have better numbers, pretty consistently).
im so confused how do I get to this “common data set”? is on this website ?
Each university should have it accessible on their own websites. You can google ‘university name’ common data set and it should take you to the right page.
My favorite data point as a full pay parent was the amount of kids with no need whose tuition was less than full pay.