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In the vein of my other posts on the education bubble, here is an application, courtesy of the Education Trust, that allows the user to obtain a university's graduation rate by race for years 2002 to 2006. It has multiple search options available.
For instance, compare the graduation rates between two engineering schools: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). We note, first of all, that MIT is both more competitive (1500 median SAT vs. 1335) and has a higher graduation rate overall (93.1% vs. 77%).
Yet compare the gap in graduation rates between black men and white men. At MIT, the gap is only 6.5% (difference between 94% and 87.5%), but at Georgia Tech the gap is 17.2% (difference between 74.7% and 57.5%). This despite the greater representation of minorities at MIT (18.6% vs. 11.1%).
There are some difficulties with the tool. For instance, it doesn't break out the minority enrollment by specific races, nor does it give the median SAT by race. But it appears on the surface that an acceptance letter from MIT tells a black applicant much more about MIT's confidence in him than an acceptance letter from Georgia Tech tells an applicant of any race.
It also shows that affirmative action costs the elite tier of universities and their students relatively little. MIT admits of all races seem abundantly qualified for the MIT program. So MIT can boost its minority enrollment with affirmative action without generating an excessively large dropout population.
As we drop to the second tier, the cost becomes significant. MIT's affirmative action admits reduce the qualified pool of minorities from which Georgia Tech would otherwise draw its students. Georgia Tech must dig even deeper into the social barrel to come up with even a modest percentage of minorities, and it then proceed to flunk close to half of these prior to graduation.
6 comments:
Another possibility is that once you get into MIT, it's generaly more difficult to flunk out. Medical school is that way. Once you get in, it's pretty difficult to get flushed out. Getting in is the tricky part. Though a selective one, Georgia Tech is a public university. It's more likely that they have a policy of accepting students and then weeding some of them out than a prestigious private university that can assure competence upon entry and then assume it over the course of their college career.
Quite right: I have read that the Ivy League is rife with grade inflation. But the standards of performance at MIT are not necessarily lower in absolute terms than those at Georgia Tech, only lower relative to the quality of their respective student bodies. Alternatively, perhaps the quality of instruction, and the level of personal attention and "intervention" is higher at MIT, and this raises performance.
Considering that universities can't perfectly predict a student's performance, there is an argument to be made for giving an applicant a chance to outperform his portfolio. But universities should be more up-front with students (and their families, lenders, scholarship providers, etc.) as to what that chance actually is.
What I envision is a conversation in which a counselor tells an applicant, "Here is your academic composite score. Here a performance profile of previous students with that score in your discipline. It shows that X% of students with this score failed to graduate, Y% graduated in a different major, Z% obtained less that a 3.0/4.0 average." That kind of thing. That would go a long way to encourage responsible risk-taking.
But the standards of performance at MIT are not necessarily lower in absolute terms than those at Georgia Tech
I'm sure that MIT's argument would be that the standards are the same or higher but that the students themselves are just better. That could be the case, but it wouldn't surprise me if the accepted minimums were different. In other words, if Georgia Tech had mechanisms to identify and weed kids out that MIT doesn't feel it needs (and likely doesn't need the same way that GT probably does) and a more formal manner to determine what is and is not acceptable, it would be less possible for a student to coast or otherwise perform substandardly at GT than MIT.
Some universities can be "too up-front". To pick an example, I looked over the "student profile" at a Big State University in my home state. It was apparent that my grades were good enough to get in, but only just. That surprised me. Not wanting to risk flunking out, I opted to go somewhere else instead. I excelled where I went and don't really regret that decision, but looking at people that did get admitted (whose academic portfolios were far inferior to mine and had no obvious other advantages) and graduated, it is apparent that I would not have had too much problem there. My suspicion is that they doctored the stats to make their institution look more competitive than it really is.
On a sidenote, I should say that my wife's comments about it being difficult to flunk out of medical school were not because she was ever in danger. She graduated in the top third of her class. It was just an observation that she had amongst people she did know that were struggling. I wouldn't want to impugn my wife's impressive intellect and discipline!
Your comment about doctored stats hits home. Since Congress is likely to pour money into "Big Ed", it should develop uniform reporting standards on these and a whole host of metrics. (It won't, of course.)
From an individual's perspective, the school's median GPAs and SAT scores don't tell him what he really needs to know: what probabilities does a student with his SAT scores face?
I don't know how much this distinction matters in practice, but "dropping out" is not necessarily the same as "flunking out," especially at technology-opriented universities. I had pretty good grades at Georgia Tech (3.6-ish, I think), and I dropped out because I got a job offer from a prestigious software company.
I realize that this isn't representative of all students who drop out of Georgia Tech, or even the majority, but I'm not sure it's a negligible factor, either.
In that vein, I should also add that I know far more people that dropped out for monetary reasons than actually flunked out. I suspect that sort of thing is more common at Georgia Tech than MIT (and far more common at Georgia State than Georgia Tech).
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