Texas Ed Spectator

Another ranking system.

the College Grid

After helping numerous students with their college applications, we noticed a lack of useful tools to help manage the school selection process. We decided to build a website with a “top-down” approach to researching colleges. Within a week, the College Grid was born.

It is improvement over the Princeton Review and US News and World Report in that it actually lets you sort on any of the variables. But the choice of variables!

The default sort is on the admissions rate. Obviously the creators are believers in that selectivity means better. But such a system does have its limitations. For example, select just for Texas schools and see what school shows up second with the default rating. And it even has a 99% acceptance yield! What a find! The problem is that is has a six year graduation rate of less than 20%. I’m sure that’s why there’s a column of SAT scores to give a heads-up that you might want to check into the value of the selectivity but still, is this really valuable?

The top five Texas schools in terms of four year graduation rates are ranked 1, 25, 15, 31, and 44 on the College Grid. Which is more important, selectivity or graduation rates? (They are ranked 1, 6, 2, 4, and 9 by SAT scores.)

The problem is that somebody out there doesn’t want your average college student ranking schools by graduate rates. (I’m not saying that graduation rates should be the only consideration but when your shelling out $40,000 a year, I would put it at the top of the list.) Most lists are now listing graduation rates as part of the school profile but the only place where you can actually select on it is at www.Collegeresults.org. Even the College Navigator, the website run by the federal government that actually collects the graduate rate data, doesn’t allow you to search on it.

So do potential students really not care about graduation rates or have they just been convinced that acceptance rates are actually a reflection of graduation rates?

College graduation rates, college rankings

Educator ripped for her book criticizing public schools | Houston & Texas News | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle

In her book, One Nation Under God, Dunbar argues that the country’s founding fathers created “an emphatically Christian government” and believed that government should be guided by a “biblical litmus test.”

Dunbar endorses a belief system requiring “any person desiring to govern have a sincere knowledge and appreciation for the Word of God in order to rightly govern.”

She calls public education a “subtly deceptive tool of perversion.” The establishment of public schools is unconstitutional and even “tyrannical,” she writes in the book, because it threatens the authority of families, granted by God through Scripture, to direct the instruction of their children.

So who gets to decide the “biblical litmus test?” What qualifies as “sincere knowledge?” Did she really tell the voters that she thinks that public schools are unconstitutional or just say that she was for more school choice?

I’m always amazed at the calls for a more “Christian” government. Oh sure, it’s easy to exclude the Jews and Muslims but have these people actually stopped to think about how they would define legitimate “Christians” and worship from those who aren’t? Mormons in or out? After all, this is a religion that was founded in the United States. Catholics? They had an entire colony. Would it be Christians for or against torture? And which version of the Bible would we be using?

Pew Research Center: The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey Reveals a Fluid and Diverse Pattern of Faith

The Landscape Survey confirms that the United States is on the verge of becoming a minority Protestant country; the number of Americans who report that they are members of Protestant denominations now stands at barely 51%. Moreover, the Protestant population is characterized by significant internal diversity and fragmentation, encompassing hundreds of different denominations loosely grouped around three fairly distinct religious traditions — evangelical Protestant churches (26.3% of the overall adult population), mainline Protestant churches (18.1%) and historically black Protestant churches (6.9%).

Don’t they realize that probably the best reason to keep religion out of government is so that government does pick and define the religion? Of course, I’m sure she assumes that she’ll be part of the group doing the defining…

Cyhthia Dunbar, Texas State Board of Education, SBOE

For those interested in colleges with a January term or “J” term, here’s a list based on information reported to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). I’ll work on getting the table cleaned up and completed as I can.