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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Changes in AP Scores, 2022 to 2024

Used to be, with a little work, you could download very detailed data on AP results from the College Board website: For every state, and for every course, you could see performance by ethnicity.  And, if you wanted to dig really deep, you could break out details by private and public schools, and by grade level.  I used to publish the data every couple of years. Those days are gone.  The transparency The College Board touts as a value seems to have its limits, and I understand this to some extent: Racists loved to twist the data using single-factor analysis, and that's not good for a company who is trying to make business inroads with under-represented communities as they cloak their pursuit of revenue as an altruistic push toward access. They still publish data, but as I wrote about in my last post , it's far less detailed; what's more, what is easily accessible is fairly sterile, and what's more detailed seems to be structured in a way that suggests the company doesn...
Post a Comment
Read more

Educational Attainment and the Presidential Elections

I've been fascinated for a while by the connection between political leanings and education: The correlation is so strong that I once suggested that perhaps Republicans were so anti-education because, in general, places with a higher percentage of bachelor's degree recipients were more likely to vote for Democrats. The 2024 presidential election puzzled a lot of us in higher education, and perhaps these charts will show you why: We work and probably hang around mostly people with college degrees (or higher).  Our perception is limited. With the 2024 election data just out , I thought I'd take a look at the last three elections and see if the pattern I noticed in 2016 and 2020 held.  Spoiler: It did, mostly. Before you dive into this, a couple of tips: Alaska's data is always reported in a funky way, so just ignore it here.  It's a small state (in population, that is) and it's very red.  It doesn't change the overall trends even if I could figure out how to c...
Post a Comment
Read more

Changes in SAT Scores after Test-optional

One of the intended consequences of test-optional admission policies at some institutions prior to the COVID-19 pandemic was to raise test scores reported to US News and World Report.  It's rare that you would see a proponent of test-optional admission like me admit that, but to deny it would be foolish. Because I worked at DePaul, which was an early adopter of the approach (at least among large universities), I fielded a lot of calls from colleagues who were considering it, some of whom were explicit in their reasons for doing so.  One person I spoke to came right out at the start of the call: She was only calling, she said, because her provost wanted to know how much they could raise scores if they went test-optional. If I sensed or heard that motivation, I advised people against it.  In those days, the vast majority of students took standardized admission tests like the SAT or ACT, but the percentage of students applying without tests was still relatively small; the ne...
Post a Comment
Read more