Selectivity in and of itself is meaningless as is graduation rate (in and of itself). You need context.
A very high percentage of students at BYU do not graduate four years after they enroll. Virtually all of the men- and increasingly, the women- go overseas on a mission and then come back to finish college. So the norm at BYU is 6 years from start to finish, not 4. Whether the college works for you and your own criteria is somewhat besides the point- the pedagogical experience of a degree from BYU takes six years.
The only reason that selectivity is controversial on CC is out a notion that anyone who prefers a college where the vast majority of students show up on day one ready for college work (vs. remedial) must be a prestige %^&* and you can get a perfectly fine education at an open enrollment U. And my cousin who is a millionaire graduated from one of those colleges so you know it’s got to be good.
Go talk to professors who teach at these colleges. Let them tell you about the experience of teaching a class where a not insignificant number of students have never written a research paper, have not heard of Karl Marx, don’t know what a hypothesis is.
I am not suggesting that these kids are not deserving of a helping hand- and many of them are brilliant but the victims of bad schools. And they will turn it around Freshman year and go on to become terrific students. And others will manage to become adequate students and that’s ok also.
But posters here like to hector other posters that their kid who is a National Merit Finalist is surely not “too good” to attend a college with kids who are essentially repeating 10th grade. And only a prestige ^&* pays tuition because the smart people know to get a full merit ride. And only a moron would consider the skillset of the kids sitting in the classroom or lab or seminar room to be at all relevant to the level of instruction and discussion that would go on in college.
Outcomes are much more important in my opinion than standardized test scores in high school.
Are the kids graduating? On time? With good jobs? Good grad schools?
In the music world a small group of schools greatly outperform virtually the rest for classical music.
In Silicon Valley certain schools have far better placement records than the rest.
For placement into the top law schools (and then the major firms) a limited number schools are over represented.
Many studies, have analyzed how selectivity and other factors impact graduation rate for individual students, and whether an individual student’s chance of graduation better follows the school’s overall graduation rate or the individual’s incoming academic factors. One example, is http://aer.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/07/25/0002831214544298.full.pdf . A quote from the study is below.
Note that they did find other factors that did have notable correlations with an individual’s graduation rate, after adding both individual and institutional controls. An example is tuition. An increased tuition was associated with an increase in a student’s chance of graduation, after controlling for financial aid differences and the student’s net cost, among other things.
This study like most others focused on 6-year graduation. 4-year graduation has other limitations related to things like major distribution, whether the college assists or encourages co-ops/jobs, offers co-terminal masters degrees, percent Div I athletes, etc. For example, the entering class at GeorgiaTech has mean HS GPA of 3.95 and mean SAT of ~2100, yet they have a 4-year graduation rate of only 39%, far less than most other colleges with such excellent students, some of which have >90% grad rates. This relatively low 4-year graduation rate occurs because GeorgiaTech offers an optional 5-year co-op program to students where students alternate semesters of on-campus study with semesters of full-time paid employment. A large portion of students choose to take advantage of this 5-year program and get paid work experience while in college, as can be seen in the large difference between 4-year and 5-year graduation rates. I expect choosing this program is extremely helpful in getting a great first job after college, and personally would consider this a big plus in favor of Georgiatech rather than a deal breaker.
Looking at navigator data, I’ve seen a few instances where schools with an anomalously low admit rate given their non-existent reputation*. Beyond noticing the anomaly I’d never really considered why but I’m guessing they appeal to niches that are poorly prepped for college. For the majority of schools, I’d stick with my fundamental premise that selectivity and admit rate are inversely correlated. That said, I’d concede your point that schools with similar admit rates might not be as selective. Comparing our three directionals (Western, Eastern, and Central), navigator and naviance data show them with admit%/graduation%/GPA/ACT of the following: 85/72/3.4/26, 74/46/3.05/22, 86/53/3.08/23. It’s clear that Western has a more competitive student than Eastern or Central and is presumedly more selective even though it has the same admit percentage as Eastern.
As an aside, implying that a focus on graduation rates serves to disingenuously mask a hunt for prestige is unnecessarily cynical as graduation rates imply a positive outcome. Using a specific example, Catholic schools are noted for stronger than expected outcomes for their students.
*wanting a school with a good reputation shouldn’t be confused with chasing prestige. There are innumerable schools with good reputations that aren’t prestigious.
@AroundHere “How are parents researching sexual assault on campus? Who makes this info available?”
Google is the fastest way. Colleges are required under Title IX (I think) to make a uniform report of crimes on campus. They report robbery, burglary, auto theft, assault and sexual assaults. There are also stats for drug and alcohol arrests. It’s usually buried on the school’s site so Google was the easiest way to find it for me.
A university that calls itself Christian but fails to uphold the those principles on a macro level. An example is when students repeatedly use alcohol and drugs and sex is rampant and open. Everyone deserves a second chance maybe a third but when no serious disciplinary action is ever taken the rules become a joke. The spiritual balance of that community becomes compromised. Might as well become any public university at that point.
Yes, the proper way to consider graduation rates is to compare them with expected graduation rates based on admission selectivity and other characteristics like tendency of students to do co-ops, etc. (but also beware of schools trying to game the reporting like Mount Saint Mary’s). Raw graduation rates will generally correlate to prestige rankings which are correlated to admission selectivity; if you want to find the treatment effect on graduation rates of the college, you need to filter out the (usually much larger) selection effect.
I just told youngest D this morning that I’m vetoing the school with the clothing-optional dorm, especially since it already had a black spot on its reputation for high prevalence of drug use. This was not really a veto, since the school had already fallen out of the top 6 or 7 on the list anyway and she’s only a junior so it wasn’t as if she had been admitted yet.
While visiting colleges with S, I sort of vetoed one that seemed like an academic playground for the rich who were never going to need jobs after graduation. That impression confirmed what I had already noticed about the “career” paths of the school’s alums we knew.
I am religious, but am not a fan of the very conservative Christian colleges, but more due to their low educational quality and general close-mindedness than their religious character per se. By that I mean that I wouldn’t care at all if they held strong positions on certain social issues such as, say, abortion. I would care, though, if they were rigid in a Stepford wives kind of way–if everyone had to think the same way about absolutely every topic or lifestyle choice (homeschooling, eating organic food, morning “quiet times” and the like) or they’d not be considered a “real” Christian.
I didn’t think I had ever “vetoed” any college, but it occured to me just now, that I did indeed veto some.
As a HS student my daughter was pursuing a path of playing her sport in college. She attended national recruiting tournaments, and she was getting attention from coaches. She was a strong but not tippy top HS student, and we wanted her to pick a school that would be an academic match, regardless of the strength of the program of her particular sport.
She did the leg work of staying in contact with coaches, handling overnight visits, and creating a final list of college applications, which included colleges that were recruiting her on up to a couple of D1 universities where she would only play her sport at a club level.
My vetoing came early on when she was getting emails from coaches from colleges that would have been terrible fits for her on every level. An off the charts extremely religious college. An excellent but very tiny rural LAC many states away with the closest airport a good hour away from the campus. After she visited one college (on a recruit visit) where she said, " I don’t think I would be challenged here." I scratched off a couple of other, similar colleges that were academic mismatches.
She was a little overwhelmed with the process of picking colleges to apply to anyway, and was sort of relieved to have me say, “Nope, not that one,” when she had no prior knowledge of a college whose coach was contacting her.
We also vetoed one highly ranked private university after my second son recieved an acceptance along with a financial package that still made the university over the top expensive for us.
It’s interesting that some people consider the low 4 year graduation rate to be a negatives for some schools. I wouldn’t tell my kid they can’t go to a school based on 4 year graduation rates but if her plan to major in engineering stands, I will caution her about colleges with very high 4 year graduation rates. It seems to me that a good co-op program would be extemely beneficial for her career goals. More so than graduating in 4 years. If kids at some schools are pressured to finish in 4 years so that those colleges get to claim the higher grad in 4 statistic, I’d worry that she might have to skip the best co-op to do it.
I mentioned this thread to my daughters this morning over breakfast, along with the fact that I’d veto any co-ed bathrooms. Neither of them had any idea that there WERE co-ed bathrooms and said “that’s just gross”.
One of them really likes her own space (and I can see her in a single with an en-suite bathroom as a high priority for her), and the other one loves to share everything with everyone (much like her mother), and the younger one was still shuddering at the idea of boys in “her” bathroom. Ironically, the state her bathroom is usually in would cause most boys to pass out and vomit ;).
So a lot of my “dealbreakers” are coming from a fairly good idea of what would make my kids unhappy, coupled with the wisdom of making deliberate choices over the years and seeing good outcomes from said choices. I don’t always know what makes them happy (I am happily surprised by a lot of the stuff they like that’s different than what my husband or I like), but I usually know what causes them to be miserable. And college has enough challenges without foisting stuff on them that I KNOW is going to suck.
Younger D asked if you’re allowed to have a “pocket pet” in the dorms like a hamster or a gerbil (she’s had gerbils for years). I don’t know how to research for that, and I also wonder if it’d be someone else’s dealbreaker…
" Neither of them had any idea that there WERE co-ed bathrooms and said ‘that’s just gross’."
Congrats to you parents who have raised kids (especially daughters) who are perfectly fine with co-ed johns. But I’m guessing that when told about co-ed bathrooms, the vast majority of students who were raised by mere mortals react exactly–and I mean EXACTLY, like with the exact same 3 words–as MotherofDragon’s daughters.
When I was in college in the 70’s I lived in a coed by room dorm my freshman year. The dorm was very big so we all just used the bathroom nearest our room - so they were effectively coed bathrooms. No one cared at all. If someone did they just didn’t pick that dorm to live in (there were single sex dorms, dorms which were single sex by floor and dorms which were single sex by wing.) They also have these things in dorm bathrooms called stalls and shower stalls have curtains.
My son and daughter share a bathroom. And my wife and I share another. The idea that an 18 yo kid would have no concept of a co-ed bathroom seems odd to me. But maybe with all these McMansions we read about everyone has their own bathroom.
I’m surprised at the number of posters I see who insist they or their child needs a private bathroom at college. I wonder if it’s because of the growth in house sizes and attendant proliferation of en suite bathrooms. I grew up in a wealthy suburb but no kid I knew had a private bathroom so we all went off to college expecting to share. Having a coed bathroom at school was no worse than sharing a bathroom with brothers and in my experience the boys were no slobbier than the girls.
