How could Chicago have recruited well over 25% Asian Americans in three of the last 5 years and still have total number of Asians at 957, instead of over 1,500 unless a large number of them are dropping out of school?
The common sense response would be that the year-by-year statistics including international students from Asian countries, while total enrollment does not.
I wonder if the class of year reports are what race students reported on their application and the registrar numbers are what students checked off at registration? I didn’t crunch the numbers but there were a lot of unspecified or mixed race reported on the registrars report. I know for important legal document purposes my children report the most technically correct race but when they fill out stuff they don’t deem important they may self report one of their two ethnicities, no race, mixed, or both ethnicities. Perhaps when students fill these forms out on their own they are reporting something different than they did on their application?
There is something interesting going on here. I crunched the numbers further and it looks like every minority group is overstated in the Admission numbers, compared to the Enrollment report. The only group that is understated are Whites by just over 20% compared to the Enrollment report
Some or all of following may be happening
Some multi-racial Students are declaring themselves as belonging to an URM group exclusively at the time of applying to gain an edge, but once they get in, they start identifying as Multi-racial, thus bringing their numbers down in the enrollment reports
Multi-racial Students with White and Asian ancestry are not identifying themselves as Whites during admission, but once they get admitted, they are identifying themselves as White.
or maybe the University is overstating its diversity numbers on the website, but accurately reporting them to IPEDS.
So because I worked in IR for another institution I was naturally curious. I looked back at IPEDS for the entering classes of 2016, 2017, 2018. which would be the reporting years of 2012, 2013, 2014 - The number of enrolled Asian students were 17%, 18%, 17% respectively. This is very different from the profile of each year. Very different.
So this means that either the report from the class profile or the IPEDS report is wrong. As a former pro in this field I would guess that two different departments are doing the reporting and one is doing it wrong. I would also venture to guess that either they are using a different database system or they are looking at applicants and not at those they admitted and they used the wrong numbers for the profile.
IPEDS is typically collected in Nov. This means that the data was probably pulled from an up to data student data system after a census was taken. I do not know when the class profiles come out but someone really should either ask, U Chicago or ask the Department of Education because someone’s numbers are wrong.
@exacademic at my old job we had different methods for pulling data from the student system. All gave different numbers. We eventually bypassed everything and started pulling directly from the database that the system runs on. Often one department has one method for pulling their data and another uses a different interface, giving totally different numbers, yet pulling from the same database. Just different interfaces from the same program.
U of Chicago has made one pretty significant mistake, however. They don’t seem to have one department controlling everything to check for errors. Before we publicised any data live on our website, it had to be approved by one specific person in one department. Everything went passed him, IPEDs, publicly displayed enrollment data, fact book. We wanted no mistakes, ever. This is a big error and should have been caught by institutional research or someone assigned just for this purpose.