The "6 year" graduation rate

tk21769
Tue, 15 Sep 2015 23:25:57 +0000

Over 20% of undergraduates at Michigan are engineering majors. I noticed Kiplinger’s got Princeton’s percentages correct, but completely screwed up on Michigan’s. So much for accuracy. I have to wonder what else they screwed up on with these figures?

I took the percentage of graduating engineering majors from the CDS, section J (not Kiplinger).
Michigan’s CDS files are here:
http://obp.umich.edu/root/facts-figures/common-data-set/
For 2014-15, Michigan reports the number of graduating engineering majors as 16%.

For the number of students graduating within 4 years or less, the same CDS (line B7) reports 4513.
That’s out of an initial cohort of 5955 (line B6). 4513/ 5955 = 76%, the same number as Kiplinger’s.

Now it may be true that 21.1% of Michigan’s entire undergraduate student body is “enrolled in engineering”. Maybe that number is indeed higher than the corresponding number for some other schools with higher 4y graduation rates. If so, that fact might help explain some 4y graduation rate differences. However, to reach that conclusion fairly, we’d need to compare apples to apples. The CDS does not report the number “enrolled in engineering”. It reports the percentage of graduating engineering majors.

But however you count these numbers, I’m pretty sure Michigan does not have more engineering students than MIT, Caltech, or Mudd. I doubt Michigan has significantly more than Princeton or JHU … and probably not many more than Tufts or Cornell. All these schools have higher 4y graduation rates than Michigan. There appears to be some other factor, besides the percentage of engineering students, affecting the 4y graduation rates.