If college graduation rates were high school graduation rates, every politician, pundit, and policy wonk would be in the mainstream media talking about the crisis of college dropouts and devising ways to tie faculty evaluation to student graduation. Not that such an approach is necessarily the answer. After all, given the situation with high school graduation rates, I’m not sure that we would actually come up with any solutions but, boy, we sure would be talking about it.
How Come No One is Talking About Pathetic College Graduation Rates?
There are common stereotypes of public and private colleges. Public universities offer a much lower sticker price than private institutions while private colleges have the reputation of being small and personal but expensive. And while these perceptions contain some truth, you really shouldn’t let them limit your college search.
Should you start your undergraduate education at a community college to save money? As usual, there is rarely a simply yes or no answer. So many factors for college success vary from institution to institution and so much depends on the individual that any answer is going to have to be qualified.
What does it mean if a college or university has a relatively high percentage of international students? Does it indicate better tuition deals for foreign students either in terms of financial aid or lower out-of-state tuition? Or does it mean that the school is better at recruiting international students for full pay students?
Are your chances of becoming president better today than they were in 1990? Given that the population in 1990 was 248,709,873 and increased by 24% to 308,745,538 in 2010, your chances are worse. While the general population has increased, there is still only one president. Despite population growth, we still have 435 members in the House of Representatives, the same number as in 1911. If the proportion of the number of representatives kept pace with the population since then, we would be looking at a House of Representatives approaching 1,500.
College Confidential seems to be a lot like the US News College Rankings. Either people use it blindly as the final word on college admissions or they see it as simply the manifestation of all that is wrong with the college admissions process. The reality is that College Confidential, like
In the United States, there isn’t any official difference between a college and a university. There are no rules that require certain types of higher education institutions to use the term “college” and others to use “university.”
