When high school students start looking for colleges to apply to, they rarely consider college graduation rates. Even with the sky-rocketing costs of college, most families still don’t consider graduation rates. They may notice it when a school advertises its four-year graduation guarantee but I suspect most just dismiss it as not applying to “their” situation.
(See the list for 2022 at the end of the post.) What are the hardest colleges to get into? Anyone going through the college admissions process can’t help but ask the question at least once. It’s a lot like visiting a Parade of Homes that you know you’ll never afford or maybe like rubbernecking while driving past a car wreck on the freeway-which ever analogy works for you. Of course, you can just look at US News College Rankings and get a pretty good idea. And that’s the point, everything in the media seems to reinforce the perception that exclusivity equals quality. Even if when we know better, we can’t help but feel insecure when we choose a lesser-known college.
Listing the 10 Worst Colleges is a public service I’m providing as an inoculation against the annual fall media college ranking mania. It is a reminder that rankings are flawed and have their limitations. While they can provide useful information, too few people bother to look beyond the ranking order to evaluate the data used in creating the rankings.
To get an idea of what I’m talking about, let’s take a look at the following list of the 10 worst colleges (yes, there are more than 10 because of ties):
Assume you are buying a car. All other factors are equal. Do you pick the one that costs $15,000 or $30,000? Seems like a no-brainer–go with the cheaper one.
Okay, assume all other factors are equal. Do you pick the red one or the blue one? Now it depends on what colors you happen to like.
If you want to pay less for college, you need to pay more attention to college statistics. I’m sure many parents and students hip deep in the college admissions process think that they are drowning in college statistics but are still facing the prospect of impossible tuition bills. The problem is that they aren’t paying attention to the right statistics, or at the very least, not considering them in terms of how they affect the cost of going to college.
Before parents sit back and let their kids drive the college application process, there are some numbers they need to understand when comparing colleges. Because while it’s true that it’s the student who is going to attend college, the colleges are pretty clear that they are going to turn to the parents to pay the bill. And anyone expected to write a check to cover the cost of college, needs to have some meaningful numbers to evaluate the value of what their buying. However, not all numbers are created equal. For example, the acceleration speed of a car and its sticker price are both numbers, but one probably will have priority over the other for most people making a car purchase. Understanding these five numbers will provide you with some basic references for comparing colleges to decide if you’re willing to pay the college’s asking price.
(Updated for 2022) I just finished updating the list of 50-50 colleges with the latest IPEDS data release and, as usual, thought I would share some statistically non-significant (as far as I know) observations. For those who don’t know what I mean by 50-50 colleges, these are colleges that accept at least 49% of students and have at least a 49% graduation rate. There are currently 600 such institutions with at least 500 or more full-time undergraduates up from the previous year’s 561.
The NCAA has a public service announcement stating that most of their athletes go pro in something other than sports. They actually provide a table with the probability of competing beyond high school and the percentage who actually make it to the professional level. Given this information, any sensible athlete should pay serious attention to the student part of “student-athletes.”
One thing prospective student-athletes should take a look at is the graduation rate for the schools they’re interested in and compare the graduation rate for their sport. It’s not hard to do.
