In measuring “Selectivity” for national universities and LACs, USNWR considers:
- Critical reading and math portions of the SAT and composite ACT scores (weighted 65%)
- High school class standing in top 10% (weighted 25%)
- Acceptance Rate (weighted 10%)
If we use something like the USNWR method, would the 6y graduation rate be correlated strongly with Selectivity?
A few years ago I tried to reverse engineer the US News selectivity assessment for 75 “top” colleges (universities and LACs). I used an average of SAT CR+M (but not the ACT scores); ranked the scores, class standing, and acceptance rate separately; then took a weighted average of the 3 individual ranks (using the USNWR 65-25-10 weights). I held out schools without published CDS files (such as UChicago and Columbia). By now, the data I used would be about 4-5 years old. FWIW, my top 50 by selectivity were:
Cal Tech
Harvard, Yale
MIT
Princeton
Stanford
Washington U
Harvey Mudd
Vanderbilt
Pomona
Northwestern, Dartmouth
Penn
Duke, Brown
Rice
Tufts
Swarthmore
Amherst
Williams
Bowdoin
Georgetown, Notre Dame
Haverford, JHU
Carnegie Mellon, Cornell
Carleton, UC Berkeley
Wellesley, Claremont McK
W&L, USC
Wesleyan
Middlebury
Vassar, GA Tech
Hamilton
UVA
Northeastern, Rensselaer
W&M, Emory
Michigan, Scripps, Colgate
UCLA
There is indeed a lot of overlap between this set of schools and the set of top ~50 by 6y graduation rate.
However, the rank order of the two sets is a bit different; in some cases, the order is fairly far off.
Among schools that appear both in my T50 and in the T55 by graduation rate, here are a few that I rank much higher by selectivity:
Caltech (1st by selectivity, 12th by graduation rate)
Stanford (6th by selectivity, 17th by graduation rate)
WashU (7th by selectivity, 21st by graduation rate)
Here are a few that rank much higher by graduation rate than they apparently did by selectivity:
Davidson (7th by graduation rate, 54th by my selectivity rating)
Notre Dame (9th by graduation rate, 25th by my selectivity rating)
UVa (20th by graduation rate, 41st by my selectivity rating)
I’m fairly confident that Caltech and Stanford are much more selective schools than Davidson and Notre Dame. But then, it may be the case that some of these schools (e.g Berkeley, GaTech) are much more selective for some kinds of applicants (OOS, engineering) than any of these overall metrics suggest.