<p>In helping my sons search for good colleges to attend, I have been frustrated by one thing- not being able to assess the academic environment at a school, or what I might call the academic “seriousness”, or the tendency to address academics first and party second.<br>
USNWR doesn’t really help here, since I already know that better students to begin with tend to produce better work in college, and besides I would like to be able to compare seemingly similar schools with each other, as well as identify less selective and prestigious schools whose students nevertheless stand out as high achievers. And, the typical USNWR intitutional stats that I am aware of don’t seem to focus directly on RESULTS, although I agree that many categories of data are very useful.
I also don’t think I can rely on evaluations from places like the Princeton Review, which 1) seem overly qualitative; 2) lack any common evaluation standard, since the respondents themselves are from varied student populations; and 3) I suspect that in most cases the number of respondents from a given school is very small, making the results no more than a few isolated personal opinions. </p>
<p>I think a short list of things I’d like to know, that I don’t already know, would include:</p>
<p>1) % of graduates applying to graduate or professional schools
2) % of applicants to graduate or professional schools, who are accepted
3) % of graduates not attending graduate or prof. school, who obtain jobs in a field related to their major
4) possibly, GRE, MCAT, LSAT ave. percentile results, or some such.</p>
<p>I know much of this information is available form various sources, including the institutions themselves in some cases. what I want help with, is whether this kind of data is readily available, in summarized form for all (or most) institutions, from a single source?</p>
<p>This doesn’t address the four metrics that you listed, but it occurs to me that NSSE may help you get at some of the things you are looking for.</p>
<p>NSSE is desgined to measure “student engagement” and asks students to report on their activities and behaviors inside and outside of the classroom, such as writing papers, being prepared for class, working with faculty closely, etc. Schools generally survey 2nd-semester freshmen, and seniors who are about to graduate.</p>
<p>The kicker is, it’s not the single-source information you’re hoping for. I mean, all schools that do NSSE take the same survey, but there is not a central reporting location. A lot of schools use NSSE for self-assessment and improvement, and thus they treat the results as internal documents (not recruitment materials). But you might be able to find some information on some of the schools you’re looking into.</p>
<p>I hesitated even typing all this out because it falls short of so much of what you were asking for in terms of availability and ease of comparison.</p>
<p>hoedown - I think the NSSE would answer the key question many of us want to ask, and quite possibly the OP’s real question. I’ve read the survey, and it appears to be a great way to evaluate a college. I only wish the colleges were more inclined to share the results!</p>
<p>Weldon: Here are the schools with the highest average LSAT scores, and that send the most students to top professional programs (measured by WSJ):</p>
<p>Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Dartmouth, Duke, Columbia, MIT, Brown, Northwestern, Chicago
^in all of the above, you will find a range of how much emphasis is placed on social life versus academics: from Dartmouth, Duke, and Stanford on one end to MIT and Chicago on the other. However, having a more active social scene is not a bad thing. And all these schools have excellent LSAT averages (high 160s) and admissions into top programs. </p>
<p>LACs include: Amherst, Williams, and Swarthmore</p>
<p>To hoedown: Thank you for the reply, I am aware of the NSSE reports and I do find their “engagement” approach intriguing. I have actually read some of these for individual institutions (as you’ve said, they’re not necessarily handy) and I see two potential drawbacks: 1) are the respondents being truthful? (I hate to be cynical but it seems to be pretty common for people to paint the rosiest possible picture of themselves); and 2) frequency of class attendance, frequency of papers, participation in class discussion etc. really does not address the quality (or rigorousness) of the class, the paper, the discussion, etc. Time working with professors however is a very crucial thing to know.
To thethoughtprocess: I am not really surprised that the schools you mention are at the top of the test score heap as well as being successful at getting students into graduate programs. But my point is just this, the entering students are already at the top. I would like to find some way of assessing what the institution is doing for the students, relfecting its seriousness of purpose. So, for example, you might be able to compare the ave. percentile on LSATs and GREs against the ave. %ile of incoming students on the SAT to see if there is an improvement. Or, you could compare the % of students going to graduate school from one institution to the % from another institution with similar incoming stats, to judge which may provide the more effective educational experience.</p>
<p>PS to hoedown and rainmama: you are essentially right I think about what I am trying to get at; if I were to put it in words, it would be like an NSSE report but with verifiable data and with some definable standard for the quality of the experiences being reported, across all institutions. It is unfortunate sometimes that the harder the statistics, the more the full story is obscured. Anyway, what I had listed in my initial posting was intended as a way to get to the NSSE kind of story indirectly while adressing the shortcomings I mentioned in my second posting</p>