<p>Agree with the last two comments and I’ll echo advice I got in my own similarly skeptical thread on this topic that has proven true: it all comes down to the student’s personal choices. </p>
<p>Whether a particular student will graduate in four years at Oberlin is almost entirely a function of the student …which a parent has superior knowledge about.</p>
<p>If my child was not likely to get it done in four years – for a variety of reasons, from being very exploratory to being focused on practical ways to serve the world and not hung up on getting a degree to do so, to coming in with no AP credits and a good possibility of wanting to shift majors midstream several times across disciplines with very little overlap – and if, in cases such as those, I was also strongly committed to “four and out” for my student, then, yes, I might scratch Oberlin and some other (perhaps all) liberal arts institutions off my child’s list.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that these statistics are about 6 or 7 students out of 100. On a personal level, they matter if (a) you think your child is likely to hit that narrow band of students (in my case, I told Junior he does not have that option and he has changed majors, experimented in other disciplines and will have no difficulty graduating “on time”) OR (b) the factors that lead to that difference make for an overhall hostile and oppressive learning environment for a much greater share of students who end up graduating “on time” despite an awful experience (for which I have seen no evidence, anecdotally or otherwise).</p>
<p>The concern here is best addressed by the parent looking at their own child and sizing them up far better than it will be figured out by burrowing ever deeper into statistics and pools of data about large groups of people who are not their child.</p>