Purdue freshman retention rate

gstein
Tue, 18 May 2010 13:17:57 +0000

Personally, I don’t have much of a problem with low retention rates at state schools. State schools are known for accepting tons of people, even in some of the more prestigious ones. A large portion of these kids have no idea what they want to do, come to college mainly to party or because they were told by their parents that’s what you do after high school, and major in engineering because they “liked” math and science in high school.

Going from high school to a state school, it’s not easy to pick out the ones that are serious about engineering/college. There are honors kids that flunk out because they are not used to the environment of college, and there are kids with mediocre grades in HS that excel in college. The only relatively “fair” way to level the playing field is to make classes very difficult, and find out who wants to put in the hours to do well (or even just get by).

Yeah, it sucks… and as I’m finishing up my junior year I’m still going through some of these classes that seem like they want to fail a portion of their students. It’s just the nature of the beast.