A different sort of ranking

hoedown
Thu, 19 May 2005 21:50:34 +0000

His complaint points to more a problem of interpretation, not measurement (to my reckoning). Of course students leave for a variety of reasons, some of them quite good ones that are not a college’s “fault” at all. The scholar who first promoted the idea of expected graduation rates has also stated that 50% of the variance in graduation rates can be attributed to non-institutional factors.

It’s an imperfect indicator, but it adds another dimension to graduation rates, just as do considerations of SES and other factors discussed here.