Of the 464 colleges and universities on the 50-50 list, 179 of them are public institutions. Furthermore, 50-50 schools are not distributed equally among all of the states. That means that if you want to start your search with the largest number of schools possible, you don’t want to immediately eliminate out-of-state public institutions.
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.
Part of the college experience is leaving home, meeting new people, discovering new places, and hopefully learning a little just from the experiencing something different. However, there are two major factors that determine how likely this is to happen. One, how far away students are willing to travel to college and two, if a student attends a state institution.
