The school’s graduation rate is NOT a reflection of whether a student of a certain caliber is able to to graduate. Rather, it’s an accurate measure of the support systems that a school provides, the rigor of a school’s curriculum, teaching faculty and peers, which can provide context. So, yes, although it’s not a metric for predicting a students chances, it provides on how academically strong the school is w/ its resources for students.
In a report commissioned by Harvey Mudd a little over two years ago after the school implemented a more “holistic” admission policy, some faculty members were quoted as saying the students were unprepared, or less prepared, for their classes, and there was notable deterioration in the quality of students accepted to Harvey Mudd. Incidences of mental health issues were also significantly increased during the same period. For the “special” groups (athlete, development, legacy, URM), there’re plenty of studies to show they’re overall less qualified, which shouldn’t surprise anyone.
There’s no denying that there’re more depressions and other mental health issues today on campuses. Of course, there’re a number of causes. The studies I’ve seen show roughly a quarter of them could be attributed to cost-related causes including the need to work part-time (possibly, some of these students may have the same issues even if they didn’t work part-time), but the majority (50% or more) were due to students’ inability to keep up with their assignments/coursework.
I don’t assume that a school’s grad rate is my “student’s personal chance of graduating in 4 or 6 years…” I was never concerned that my kids wouldn’t graduate …but rather, will most of the kids they started with graduate with them?
I used the figure (along with others) to get a picture of the school. My guess is that personal finances play a big part in that figure. And transfers. And if a lot of kids transfer, why?
I asked at one of the small schools (~2,000 students total) why the smaller D3 schools (not the higher level ones) seemed to have a lower freshmen retention rate (which affects grad rate). The AO said for their particular school, a lot of athletes came to play a sport and if the sport didn’t work out, they transferred.
At another small school, our tour guide was asked why he picked that school. He replied he came to play soccer. The soccer didn’t work out and he planned on transferring. (Follow up, he ended up staying because he realized how many friends he made and how much he ended up liking the actual school. So he went for the wrong reasons, but stayed for the right ones.)
A kid we know is planning on playing a D2 sport at a school that has a less than 40% grad rate. And of those approx 60% who do not graduate from there were a large number of transfers (either 40% or 60%, I don’t recall which). Yikes. why are so many transferring?? That would raise red flags for me.
The level of obtuseness people exhibit on this thread is astounding.
ucbalumnus opened the thread by stating something I believe is clearly correct and data-based: graduation rates primarily reflect the percentage of lower-income (and probably middle-income) students a college has, and the percentage of students with weak academic preparation the college has. There are other demographic factors as well, listed by Data10 in post #31, that have nothing to do with the quality of a college’s educational offerings.
Unless you correct for those factors, a college’s 4- or 6-year graduation rate, or for that matter its first-year retention rate, tells you nothing meaningful about “the support systems that a school provides, the rigor of a school’s curriculum, teaching faculty and peers . . . [or] how academically strong the school is.” At best, it is an imperfect proxy for how adequate financial aid is, and how rigorously the college bars its gates against students whose preparation may be imperfect, often because they went to imperfect schools. If you do back all those factors out, then maybe you will learn something from examining comparative graduation rates about the quality of a college’s support systems or its teaching, but it won’t necessarily be easy.
Re: #41
Harvey Mudd is not representative of most colleges. It is one of the few highly selective colleges where top end high school credentials do not assure being able to handle the rigor of the required curriculum (the other obvious one is Caltech).
Also, the “special” applicants are commonly held to lower standards, but that does not necessarily mean lower than in past years.
Regarding mental health issues, are there actually more issues, or just more diagnosis?
Freshman retention was what I also looked at @RookieCollegeMom - like you, I wasn’t worried about my kid’s chance of graduating but I did care she went to a school where students chose to stay because they were (overall) happy. There’s always going to be some poor fits and financial issues but when you have two schools with the same general tuition / population and one has twice as many freshman leave after year 1 as the other - that says something about how happy overall students are with the educational experience. Ditto with graduation rates - you can’t compare Harvard’s graduation rate with ASU but you can compare ASU with peer schools. If you have two large state schools of comparable cost and one graduates 80% in 6 years and the other graduates less than 60% in the same time period… I would certainly think most students/parents would consider that an important factor to weight in applying.
@ucbalumnus complains about the NYTimes study about “expected” graduation rates versus actual graduation rates at a lot of colleges:
They didn’t totally ignore ability to pay: they looked at parental income. The worst-performing schools are all publics, and not (with a quick look) publics that are notably expensive.
Most of the top schools are in blue states. All of the bottom schools are in red states, except one school in purple Minnesota. What does this mean? I have no idea. Maybe the worst schools for graduation rates are just greatly underfunded.
Regarding specific schools in terms of their 4-year graduation rates, U.S. News lists them in this analysis:
https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/highest-grad-rate
The top schools will obviously appear along a continuum with those that follow, but may share characteristics among themselves nonetheless. For example, colleges with Catholic affiliations are highly represented, as are NESCACs:
Rank | College | 4-year Graduation Rate
- Julliard: 94%
- Bowdoin: 91%
- Holy Cross: 91%
- Amherst: 90%
- Babson: 90%
- Georgetown: 90%
- Hamilton: 90%
- Soka: 90%
- US Naval Academy: 90%
- Notre Dame: 90%
I agree Harvey Mudd is not representative of most colleges. However, the relationship that its commissioned report shows between admission standards and the quality of the student body as measured by academics makes sense and should hold for other highly selective colleges as well. The deterioration in quality is more evident and observable in STEM than in humanities and social sciences, but the conclusion should still be applicable qualitatively, if not quantitatively to the same extent. This relationship is difficult to study as colleges tend to respond to the issue by lowering their academic requirements. In fact, I believe Harvey Mudd just did that recently.
Probably both.
My guess would be that mental health issues ought not to make much difference at all. To some extent, they are probably correlated with income. To some extent, they are not correlated with anything, which means that more or less they will affect all colleges equally, and won’t provide much information to distinguish one from another. Some colleges may be marginally better than others at accommodating some types of mental illness, and thus producing a higher graduation rate for students affected by mental illness, but the difference is likely to be lost amid all sorts of noise from the other reasons kids’ progress gets interrupted.
One might expect that the colleges with the most demands and the most pressure would have the biggest problem with mental illness, but most of those colleges seem to have the best or nearly best graduation rates.
(As some of you know, one of my close friends and roommates at a college like that had a full-one schizophrenic break during the winter of his junior year. He had visual and aural hallucinations; God was talking to him and telling him how worthless he was. He was hospitalized for several weeks at least three times in the ensuing 15 months. He graduated on time, despite being literally crazy. He had enough IQ to be able to pass carefully selected courses with very concrete requirements despite his illness, and enough credit accumulated in his major to make it possible to meet his degree requirements with a little accommodation. The college was happy to accommodate to be rid of him, and to avoid alienating his alumni-filled wealthy family.)
Looking at the list, some of the characteristics that appear to be correlated with higher 4-year graduation rates than expected based on GPA/SAT/selectivity type stats of incoming students are:
Religious affiliation
Offers no/little engineering and low co-op participation rate
Non-traditional focus (Julliard, Babson, USNA, Soka)
High test optional participation (Bowdoin is highest among academic colleges, Bates is 9th)
Undergrad focus, including little opportunity for co-term grad degrees (LACs do well, Princeton leads Ivies + SM)
Most are also not large, highly selective, holistic admit, private colleges with excellent FA, a wealthy student body, and few commuters; although there are many exceptions to these generalizations.
That Harvey Mudd may have lowered its baseline admission standards does not necessarily mean that other highly selective colleges did the same.
Is that what people assume? When graduation rate comes up in our circles, it’s more concern about the possible instability of financial aid, the lack of support for mental and academic issues, the lack of appropriate peer base… especially if more capable students are transferring out, etc. social connection can also be a lesser factor if half the people you start with aren’t going to walk with you in the end. Low retention rate is just not an attractive quality in a school even if your particular student is unlikely to drop or transfer out.
More kids with financial issues are going to your state universities. In other words the ones that did not or cannot get the financial packages to afford a private school. At certain state schools many are working their way through school particularly in states where in state tuition is reasonable. I have met countless kids doing this which affects the grad rates.
I am not a big believer in hs grades telling all. Many students blossom later for a variety of reasons. A B or even a C student versus an A student in equivalent classes, what does this say? Not alot. There are so many variables that no one could possibly account for them. It varies from school, teacher, exam, to interest, family dynamics, boredom, illness and what have you. I have known plenty of average students in hs who were anything but average.
You have some state universities where many kids transfer out to their flagship schools. Not that these schools are subpar, its just what it is. And every transfer costs time. Then you have a whole bunch of parents who realize after their kids first year they can’t afford it and come home to an instate option. Or the kids who went far away and it wasn’t for them.
I take grad rates with a certain grain of salt.
Research has shown that what many on cc would consider subpar in terms of colleges ( commuter schools) are the greatest equalizers in society. Theses schools allow for social upward mobility and while not all graduate those who do greatly benefit.
At the top privates full need is met so guess what, financials aren’t a factor. If things go south for the family finances at a top private they pick up the slack, if they go south at your favorite public university, well, sorry, have a nice life.
@CU123 And yet low income students still struggle financially at top private schools. And there are still families who can’t afford their EFC at top private schools and are paying it with loans. Your sweeping generalizations are not based in fact.
The handful of wealthiest private schools provide enough financial aid to make it possible for anyone living in poverty to attend and to graduate. What they don’t provide is enough financial aid to replace the student’s potential financial contribution to his or her family, in the form of wages shared with others or services (taking care of other family members, working in a family business). That’s one of the significant reasons why it’s still challenging for poor kids to go to college even with a true full ride.
@itsgettingreal17 my take on that anyone who can’t pay the EFC from a full FN college doesn’t value the education. They (the parents) value other things more, which is fine, but the numbers don’t lie.
Other then what @JHS is talking about I don’t see how they struggle, I struggled with money in college (I didn’t have any) but I think that the real struggle is with the wealthy students who attend these colleges with them. They’re wealthy, get over it, I remember not being able to buy a slice of pizza why some of more wealthy students throwing half a pizza away.
I don’t think we can say that every meets-need college is going to be able to assure a 100% graduation rate. There will still be students who must drop out for various reasons including personal illness, to take care of a family member, or some other life event. But the “fails to graduate” will likely be much lower than their public counterparts where larger populations are sacrificing to attend as much college as possible and may have to leave because the money pot is dry. That will explain a 97.5% graduation rate at Harvard vs. a 65.7% graduation rate at Alabama. I would wager that 34% of University of Alabama students are not flunking out, but I will not wager that the quality of teaching or peer ability is low.
@ucbalumnus mentioned graduation rates in another thread, and I did not want to sidetrack that thread in my reply, so I looked up this older thread. I have been wondering about how this metric may or may not be manipulated.
I am perfectly willing to believe that most students are happy at my favorite college, and I know there are ample support systems available, so maybe that is why they have a sky-high “freshman retention rate,” “four-year graduation rate,” and “six-year graduation rate.” (Apparently, among the very highest four year rates: https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/highest-grad-rate)
BUT, I find those high reported percentages surprising in light of the experience of one freshman dorm group alone. Out of 39 freshmen, three did not make it through freshman year without having to take off one or more semesters. One had to take off for mental illness. One had to be out after receiving low grades. One has been suspended for misbehavior.
3 out of 39 is a pretty high percentage of kids not making it through an uninterrupted freshman year! Much higher than the college’s published statistics for the college as a whole. I guess, theoretically, they all are coming back after freshman year (just not right away), and the two year suspension means the student will return just in time to make a 6 year graduation rate.
Did this one dorm group just have bad luck? Or bad synergy? Or is this typical at many top colleges, and the way the numbers are reported disguises the challenges?