Skip to main content

Want to increase graduation rates? Enroll more students from wealthier families.

OK. Maybe the headline is misleading.  A bit.

I've written about this before: The interconnectedness of indicators for colleges success.  This is more of the same with fresher data to see if anything has changed. Spoiler alert: Not much.

What's new this time is the IPEDS publication of graduation rates for students who receive Pell and those who don't, along with overall graduation rates.  While the data are useful in aggregate to point out the trends, at the institutional level, they are not.

First, some points about the data:  I've included here colleges with at least 20 Pell-eligible freshmen in 2015, just to eliminate a lot of noise.  Colleges with small enrollments don't always have the IR staff to deliver the best data to IPEDS, and they make the reports a bit odd.  And even without these institutions, you see some issues.

Second, colleges that do not require tests for admission are not allowed to report tests in IPEDS.  Once you check "not required" that box with test scores gets grayed out, so attempting to report them is futile.

But, it's here.  View one shows pretty much every four-year public and private not-for-profit college in the US, and includes four points: On the left as dots are six-year grad rates for all students (light blue), Pell students, (dark blue) and all students (purple).  On the right is the gap between Pell grad rates and non-Pell students.  Again, some of these numbers are clearly wrong, or skewed by small numbers in spite of the exclusion noted above.

The next four collectively tell the story of wealth and access:


  • If you have more Pell students, your graduation rate is lower
  • While most colleges do a pretty good job of keeping Pell and non-Pell grad rates close, there are some troubling outliers
  • If you focus on increasing SAT scores in your freshman class, you'll pretty much assure yourself of enrolling fewer low-income students
  • But if you have higher mean freshman test scores, you'll see higher grad rates
In other words, test scores are income; income is fewer barriers to graduation.  And colleges are thus incentivized not to enroll more low-income students: It hurts important pseudo-measures of quality in the minds of the market: Mean test scores, and graduation rates.

If  you're interested on a much deeper dive on this with slightly older data, click here. Otherwise feel free to play with the visualization below.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Highly Rejective Colleges

If you're not following Akil Bello on Twitter, you should be.  His timeline is filled with great insights about standardized testing, and he takes great effort to point out racism (both subtle and not-so-subtle) in higher education, all while throwing in references to the Knicks and his daughter Enid, making the experience interesting, compelling, and sometimes, fun. Recently, he created the term " highly rejective colleges " as a more apt description for what are otherwise called "highly selective colleges."  As I've said before, a college that admits 15% of applicants really has a rejections office, not an admissions office.  The term appears to have taken off on Twitter, and I hope it will stick. So I took a look at the highly rejectives (really, that's all I'm going to call them from now on) and found some interesting patterns in the data. Take a look:  The 1,132 four-year, private colleges and universities with admissions data in IPEDS are incl

Freshman Migration, 1986 to 2020

(Note: I discovered that in IPEDS, Penn State Main Campus now reports with "The Pennsylvania State University" as one system.  So when you'd look at things over time, Penn State would have data until 2018, and then The Penn....etc would show up in 2020.  I found out Penn State main campus still reports its own data on the website, so I went there, and edited the IPEDS data by hand.  So if you noticed that error, it should be corrected now, but I'm not sure what I'll do in years going forward.) Freshman migration to and from the states is always a favorite visualization of mine, both because I find it a compelling and interesting topic, and because I had a few breakthroughs with calculated variables the first time I tried to do it. If you're a loyal reader, you know what this shows: The number of freshman and their movement between the states.  And if you're a loyal viewer and you use this for your work in your business, please consider supporting the costs

Doctoral recipients by bachelor's degree-granting institution, 2016-2020

Each time I publish this visualization I get a lot of traffic on the site, and I can see why. It shows all doctoral recipients (in 2016-2020) broken out by where they received their bachelor's degrees.  So, for instance, the top level view shows that UC Berkeley is the alma mater of more doctoral recipients than any other institution, followed by The University of Michigan and Cornell University. That would be interesting, but of course, these are large institutions, and it's natural to think lots of graduates will lead to lots of doctoral degrees.  No surprise there. So the visualization allows you to look at the types of colleges you or your students might want: Select a state, select public or private, select by Carnegie type if you wish.  You can also look at HBCUs if you'd like.  Most important, you can filter by doctoral degree, so if you want to see which institution sends the most students to doctorates in chemistry, you can do so. To head off the questions I get ev