I know I've been barking up the tree of " Graduation Rates are inputs, not outputs " for a long time. And I know no one is listening. So I do this, just to show you (without the dependent variable) just how unsurprising they are. Here are four views of graduation rates at America's four-year public and private, not-for-profit colleges and universities. And I've put them in four views, with several different ways to look at the data. The first (using the tabs across the top) shows four-, five-, and six-year graduation rates on the left, and "Chance in four" on the right. In other words, since everyone pretty much thinks they're going to graduate from the college they enroll in as a freshman, what are the chances of graduating in four years, rather than six? There are some surprises there, as you'll see. On all the visualizations, you can apply filters to limit the colleges you're looking at. The scroll bar (to move up or down) is on the r
I started this visualization to show how first-year classes at the highly rejective colleges had changed since COVID-19 forced them all to go to a test-optional approach for the Fall of 2021. But it sort of took on a life of its own after that, as big, beefy data sets often do. The original point was to help discount the conventional wisdom, which is propped up by a limited, old study of a small set of colleges that showed test-optional policies didn't affect diversity. I did this post last year , after just one year of data made it fairly clear they did at the institutions that had the luxury of selecting and shaping their class. This year I took it a little farther. The views, using the tabs across the top, show the same trends (now going to 2022) for Public Land Grants, Public Flagships, the Ivy and Ivy+ Institutions. In each case, choose one using the control. Note that I had colored the years by national trends: 2018 and 2019 are pre-test optional, gray is COVID, and blue