We are seeing SAIC (School at the Art Institute of Chicago) up close and personal through my son’s eyes right now. There is a key contradiction we have encountered and which is articulated in other threads here:
SAIC claims 6-year graduation rates above 60%.
Experience is that 50% or more students leave within, or shortly after, the first year. (NOTE: SAIC does NOT publish a "retention rate" which is the number of first year students who enter the second year. This is a serious omission.)
Certainly, in my son’s photography class with 12 students, 5 have already dropped out after only one semester.
How can these seeming contradictions be reconciled if SAIC is telling truth (and the grad rate statistics are consistent nationally)?
A key observation: An Uncertain Business. Unfortunately, things that look too good to be true often are. It turns out that calculating and interpreting graduation rates is far more complex and analytically challenging than it should be.
*******As a result, the numbers themselves may, despite their apparent simplicity, provide a seriously misleading picture of how well an institution is doing.
Note:
Graduation rates EXCLUDE students who transfer to another institution.
"The IPEDS calculation excludes students who begin college part time, who enroll mid-year, and who transfer from one institution to another. Put another way, IPEDS counts only those students who enroll in an institution as full-time degree-seekers and finish a degree at the same institution within a prescribed period of time."
As a result, SAIC could see a 75% attrition in the first year and still report 60% graduation rates - because the 60% roughly applies only to the 25% who stay past the first year.
It’s incredible to me. And this is true at other schools as well.
I highly recommend that any students or parents shopping schools read the linked article above - because graduation rates don’t really mean much.
4 year graduation rate: 38%
6 year graduation rate: 63%
Transfer out rate: 25%
The IPEDs calculation does take into account full time freshman that start in the fall, that then transfer out of the school during the first year, or soon after. The IPED’s calculation for graduation rates doesn’t consider students that transfer into the college.
Keep in mind that:
So these rates only apply to that 70% of students. As a comparison, UIUC percentage is 76%.
Perhaps they are fudging the numbers, but that could get them into a lot of hot water with the Feds.
If there’s only 30% retention into second year, the 60% grad rate means only 18% of incoming freshmen graduate in 6 years. Thats more than 5 out of 6 who don’t graduate.
I don’t think they are fudging…the calculations are standardized. But there is an important loophole in the calculation per the article.
First hand is xperience at SAIC is the first year program is universally hated. The loophole is that they get legitimate high grad rates while maintaining a program that leads to low retention.
All legit for the school to do. But we parents who are figuring it out also have rights to be very, very pissed about a misleading admissions process.
"“Certainly, in my son’s photography class with 12 students, 5 have already dropped out after only one semester.”
Could this be related to the fact that this is a field where people can get work without a degree? I wonder if you’d see the same pattern in oil painting or some other discipline where the kids can’t go find jobs.
If you like this issue, you would love dipping your toes into the morass that is high school dropout rates. At least at the college level you have some standardization of statistics!
I can completely understand why the “four-year graduation rate” statistic would exclude students who transferred to another institution after a year, who started part-time, or who transferred in. As for the first, there is already a standard statistic that tells you that information, so why introduce it as noise into the 4-year graduation rate? The 4-year graduation rate statistic is already noisy enough. You can’t tell whether it is measuring the level of support and counseling a college provides its students, along with the availability of required classes, or whether it is simply measuring the social class of the students, and if they have strong enough family finances and support for higher education to complete college in four years.
Ironically, on photography, that’s a field where they are ranked highest. My son’s experience was that he liked the prof, but found the instruction dull. And then, in the first year program (Core/Research), digital arts are discouraged. Photography and other digital forms get harshly dealt with in critiques by students who are entirely unfamiliar with those fields. It’s kind of insane.
It appears, though, that SAIC doesn’t like great photographs - but painfully post-treated ones that fit a very narrow definition of “art”. There’s a lot that photographers need to learn.
As to painting, drawing… Their view of art seems to be “skill free”. When we toured, the art on the walls was horrific. And the in-process work in the studios didn’t show progress toward great painting or drawing. There’s an important article I found (too late to keep my son out of the school) … http://fnewsmagazine.com/2010/08/the-first-year-experience/
Note the key idea: At SAIC building skills isn’t important.
JHS - Agree on high school rates. Nothing’s comparable between the states because each state has widely different criteria for what’s a drop out or not.
Problem with grad rates at SAIC is they are one of the few numbers SAIC features during their “sales pitch” admissions process. And being quite misleading, that’s bad.
I’ve always maintained that the fact that students who transfer are basically unaccounted for in statistics, for either college, is very misleading. Both my daughter and I transfered and still graduated in four years. No school counts us as graduated, though two count us as leaving. That really skews the data