The report on the graduation rates among colleges by Rick Hess et al. is terrific, and badly needed. Rick and the rest of you: is there any way that you could tie the numbers to the college readiness of the students? I’m thinking particularly of the work by Jennifer Kobrin at the College Board, who defined “college readiness” as the SAT score that is associated with a 65 percent probability of getting a 2.7 grade point average in the freshman year. It’s not a demanding standard of college readiness, but in a study including 165,781 students at 41 major institutions, ranging from typical state universities to highly selective schools, the benchmark combined SAT score (verbal and math) meeting the benchmark was 1,180.
Here’s my hypothesis: Even within schools that were grouped together in a level-of-competitiveness category, some admitted a lot more students with SATs below the college readiness threshhold than others, and those were the ones with the higher rates of non-completion. Any way to explore that possibility with the data at hand? The exciting outcome in this case would be that the hypothesis is rejected, and some colleges really do a better job than others in getting qualified kids through to the degree. Or (I just cannot resist the chance to be a grump), maybe the colleges with the higher graduation rates just lower their standards and hand out the BA more freely than the supposedly less effective colleges. It would be nice to know one way or the other.