The national database lists it as 97%, which ties with Haravrd as the highest among the ivy league. Regardless of if it is 97 or 98%, consider the incoming students. You have an incoming class where most students received a perfect 4.0 GPA in HS. The mean HS GPA is above 3.9 and hardly anyone received below a 3.5. The vast majority of those received such high grades while taking an extremely rigorous schedule of high level courses. Test scores are similarly high with 25th percentile scores of 700+ on all SAT sections and hardly anyone below 600.
In such a class, what percentage of students would you expect to fail out? It’s going to be near 0.
The GSR, or graduation success rate, as calculated and used by the NCAA is slightly different than the graduation rate published by schools because of the way they account for transfers and kids who remain in good standing. I will leave it to the stats people among us, but that may account for the difference between the 97 and 98 percent rates.
The real question is the relative rates. Do athletes graduate at a rate that is statistically significantly different than non athletes? I don’t care so much about whether it is a four or five year rate, because athletes often take a year off from school because of injury so they can compete for four years. This is because the Ivy only permits full time undergraduates to compete in varsity athletics.
And your point? From my Ds class, people who dropped out, but did not fail: a young lady who became pregnant and returned to her native reservation; another fellow who had a nervous breakdown, and two lads who quit to join a SF bay startup–that’s far from failing.
The one kid I know who dropped out of an Ivy League college did so because of mental health issues which emerged when he was in college but had nothing to do with his school. He happened to be a recruited football player.
@Ohiodad51,
I didn’t mean to go after you. I just don’t like the assumption I often see here that athletes admitted to elite institutions are box-of-rocks kids who skate into schools without the academic qualifications of their peers. I agree with you that there are differences between the recruiting practices of different types of schools, and your follow-up post about the 20-ACT kid demonstrates that. To say that the practices of a Williams and a Florida State are the same simply because coaches have pull at both is a little silly. Among the differences are…
Williams (and what I say here applies to all the NESCACs) doesn’t offer athletic scholarships, while FSU and schools like it do. If a Williams recruit wants to drop out, or even to never set foot on the field after being given a boost by the coach, he is fully within his rights.
Williams doesn’t hire tutors for their kids. They’re given full access to the school’s tutoring facilities just like every other student, and there is informal support from the coaches and teammates but there’s no “football tutor.” These kids have to make it on their own, like everyone else, with the caveat that they have less time due to the time suck of practices.
Small LACs like Williams have a very high percentage of kids playing on teams. Lots of kids get a boost from athletics, but the school can’t afford to dip too low because there aren’t enough non-athletes to offset a bunch of truly low scorers.
The NESCACs don’t schedule classes for normal practice times. Classes are done by 4 and the few evening seminars pick up at 7.
As has already been pointed out, admissions makes the decision at a D3 school. You don’t see a whole lot of recruits being rejected by NESCACs, but one reason is that a coach won’t put their muscle behind a kid who hasn’t passed the academic screening. NESCAC recruits are sometimes rejected, which is why admission to these schools is such a delicate and fraught dance. No one commits to these schools as a sophomore or junior and there’s no defined academic safe zone.
The point was the high graduation rate at ivies is primarily driven by the stellar academic students of the incoming class. A high graduation rate at a college where essentially nobody in the class is expected to fail is not good evidence of it being “very difficult to fail” at that college. If HYPSM… started admitting a large portion of the class that were C HS students without rigorous schedules who were in no way academically qualified, then then it would suddenly appear to be quite easy to fail, with a relatively low overall graduation rate.
“The bonus for African-American applicants is roughly equivalent to an extra 230 SAT points (on a 1600-point scale), to 185 points for Hispanics, 200 points for athletes, and 160 points for children of alumni.”
IF HYPS…if. But they don’t. They are dealing with folks with an upper margin of both apptitude and attitude. I never qualified my statement as you are doing. Given that they are dealing with very smart folks that are very motivated, coupled with the large resources of the school, while it may not be an essy road, but to straight out fail, well stats just do not support what you are saying,
The actual vs predicted graduation stats support exactly what I am saying. In 2011 (the latest free version of USNWR I could find), Yale had a predicted 6-year graduation rate of 96% based on the stats of the incoming class. In that year, the actual graduation rate was 97%. So Yale’s graduation rate was almost exactly what we’d expect based on the impressive stats of the incoming class. Some of the other ivies didn’t fare as well and had a graduation rate that was below predicted based on the stats of the incoming class. If the grad rate is approximately the same as predicted based on high academic stats of the admitted class or in some cases a little lower grad rate than expected, it doesn’t imply it is “very difficult to fail” at that college. It only suggests the college is admitting stellar students who are unlikely to fail where ever they attend college.
I’ve taken classes at colleges with a wide variety of selectivities including Stanford, RPI, SUNYA, Syracuse, Wyoming, … Fewer failed at Stanford, but I did not get the impression that it was “very difficult to fail” at Stanford compared to the others, only that a smaller portion of students did failing quality work, and the few that did fail exams generally rectified the situation quickly. The one where I found it most difficult to fail was Wyoming, but that may have related to being an online program. Nevertheless, Wyoming had a substantial failure rate, likely the highest among the colleges I attended.