80% Graduation Rate.

davezhan · March 2009

wikipedia.org wrote:

Caltech has a relatively low four-year graduation rate, compared to most leading US universities. This rate is currently about 80 percent."

80% is pretty good for a top-tier tech school, which boasts an extremely rigorous curriculum. Think about it.

python38 · March 2009

Maybe it's just me, but that does sound pretty low, all things considered; although I guess that that might be because it's quite a "different" university - not necessarily bad, just different, and a lot of people aren't aware of that difference when they choose to attend, and they end up dropping up because they didn't know what they were signing up for.

It's a great university, though. I'm applying this autumn.

dLo · March 2009

It's actually quite low for a top tier school. Most of them are at least 90% if not 95% and higher. I think I remember scanning down a set of rankings once, and the first school to be around 80% other than Caltech was some random state school.

lizzardfire · March 2009

python--I think your assessment is pretty dead-on. I would agree with that.

JNT · March 2009

Another factor is probably that some people here take five years to graduate

Quelloquialism · March 2009

Data for the class entering Caltech in Fall 2001:
- Total number of students entering the university: 214
- Total number of students graduating in four years or less (before August 2005): 175 (81.8%)
- Total number of students graduating in five years or less (before August 2006): 189 (88.3%)
- Total number of students graduating in six years or less (before August 2007): 191 (89.3%)

...but I'm too lazy to look up the numbers for other universities, so I'm still not exactly sure how this compares. =P

Balaylay · March 2009

That's slightly terrifying.

urichimaru · March 2009

Oh my gosh, it makes Caltech sound crazy hard. Is getting a pretty good GPA pretty manageable and not stressful?

FlipYou · March 2009

o0o0o crazy

Quelloquialism · March 2009

Bear in mind that not all majors are of equal difficulty. It's possible that these graduation rates are deflated by majors which either have a large number of requirements, or else include some courses which are very difficult or something like that. Just guesses, though, I don't have any numbers to back that up--it sounds reasonable, though. As for whether good GPAs are hard to come by, I don't really know--I'm just a frosh, so I haven't had anything on real grades yet.

webhappy · March 2009

LOL, it's so amusing when the 80% figure comes up. Hell, I remember thinking it looking pretty daunting. But if you talk to the alums from two decades ago, they will mention that ~1/3 of the people would fail out of Tech (or transfer, presumably)!

Quelloquialism · March 2009

Funny story, you don't even have to go back that far to see some of the really scary stuff.

Data for the class entering Caltech in Fall 1996:
- Total number of students entering the university: 216
- Total number of students graduating in four years or less (before August 2000): 156 (72.2%)
- Total number of students graduating in five years or less (before August 2001): 177 (81.9%)
- Total number of students graduating in six years or less (before August 2002): 183 (84.7%)

But this isn't really cause for concern, I think, because it's getting better. Clearly, if we assume that the rate of change of the four-year-graduation rate is constant, then the current prefroshies here should enjoy a four-year graduation rate of 97.1%. And by the entering class of 2011, more than 100% of entering freshmen will graduate on time! Yay!

silver-yms · April 2009

It's still around 80%.

I graduated last year, and I remember being surprised by how few of the entering freshmen in 2004 didn't get their degree in four years.

Stats (based off manually counting from http://pr.caltech.edu/commencement/08/bs.pdf with help from donut, facebook, and memory):

Entering freshmen: 212
Graduated in four years with honors: 96 (45.3%)
Graduated in four years without honors: 69 (32.5%)
Didn't graduate in four years: 47 (22.17%)

fizix2 · April 2009

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/596884-usnwr-2009-looking-data-xxi-4-year-graduation-rates.html

well we're certainly not georgia tech

4-Year Graduation Rate , National University

90% , Notre Dame
90% , Georgetown
89% , Princeton
88% , Harvard
88% , Boston Coll
87% , Yale
87% , U Penn
87% , Dartmouth
86% , Columbia
86% , Duke
86% , Northwestern
85% , Vanderbilt
85% , Brandeis
84% , U Chicago
84% , Cornell
84% , Johns Hopkins
84% , Brown
84% , U Virginia
84% , Tufts
84% , W&M
83% , MIT
83% , Wash U
82% , Caltech
82% , Emory
80% , Stanford
79% , Wake Forest
78% , Rice
78% , NYU
72% , Lehigh
71% , U North Carolina
70% , Carnegie Mellon
70% , U Michigan
70% , U Rochester
66% , UCLA
66% , USC
66% , Rensselaer
66% , Tulane
64% , UC Santa Barbara
63% , U Illinois
61% , UC Berkeley
59% , Case Western
58% , Penn State
56% , UCSD
53% , U Florida
51% , UC Irvine
48% , U Washington
48% , Yeshiva
47% , U Wisconsin
47% , U Texas
43% , UC Davis
33% , Georgia Tech

python38 · April 2009

Maybe Caltech is also the type of school that traditionally "introverted" people go to...? I'm going out on a limb here, but it's an interesting thought.

80% Graduation Rate.

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