Not impressed. The reporter missed an opportunity to dig into the information given to her by BASIS. The company, being for-profit, has designed their curriculum around achieving high rankings and they’ve certainly succeeded in that regard. What is less clear is how these kids are doing academically beyond high school. Aside from the fact that BASIS chooses their locations to take advantage of strong local school populations and weeds out the weaker kids by requiring a tough schedule of exams they must pass in order to proceed to the next grade, BASIS publishes the stats that will make them appear strongest. Nowhere can I find a list of college matriculations for BASIS graduates, and despite her assertion that it’s
she gives no statistics on Ivy League matriculations or even acceptances.
BASIS is cagey in how they present their information on college success. They give numbers of college acceptances instead of matriculations, skewing the reader’s perception of the strength of acceptances. For instance, I could give you a statistic that of 100 students at my [fictional] school we had acceptances to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Dartmouth, Cornell, Williams, Amherst, Bowdoin, Middlebury, and Pomona. You might say, “Wow, 10% of the class goes to amazing schools.” not realizing that all these acceptances were garnered by two applicants and everyone else went to a community college.
http://basisschools.org/achievement-and-results/college-scholarships.php
The also give acceptance rates to top colleges, e.g., 15% to top 20 national universities and liberal arts colleges. If you read it quickly that sounds like 15% of each graduating class attends a top 20 school, but let’s break it down.
Top 20? They use the top 20 in both category so we’re really talking top 40.
15%? That’s the acceptance rate to these schools so while they’d be outperforming the average if everyone were applying to Harvard, they’d be underperforming if everyone were applying to Notre Dame (#18, 19% admit rate), Georgetown (#18, 17%) or WashU (#20, 17%) as well as almost all of the LAC’s including Williams, the #1. Wellesley, at #3 has a 29% acceptance rate. And without knowing how many kids are applying we don’t know whether only one applicants was accepted to a top 40 after 7 applied (1 out of 7 at a top school) or whether many kids (say 100) applied to many top schools, leaving each kid with an acceptance and 6 rejections (100 kids accepted to a top school).
Their acceptance rate at top 100 schools (again, really top 200) is 51%. That means almost half of the kids applying are not admitted. Depending on the schools to which they’re applying and how many applications they putting in this could be a good statistic or a horrible one. The author didn’t sort this out at all.
BASIS does the same thing with their acceptance list. Almost 2000 applications were successful at a top 50 (in reality top 100) school. But how many of these are kids putting in more than one application, e.g., a kid who was admitted to both Yale and Cornell? And how many kids graduated from these BASIS schools during the years in question? Is this a top 50% sample? a top 20% sample? 5%? They really don’t tell us.
Until BASIS publishes a list of their college matriculations I’ll reserve judgement.