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

Fiske Guide Blog

But as one undergrad quoted in the report explains, “I feel that we are too small and that increasing by 30 percent at least, if not more, would benefit us in so many ways, socially and academically. Many of my upper-level courses have 10 people or less, which limits me in choosing a study group, project partners, and in class participation.” I hate it when that happens. My bet is that we won’t be seeing this quote in the viewbook any time soon. Alas, the only thing that benefits from smallness is teaching and learning, an item far down on the list of priorities at most institutions.

My initial reaction to the student’s comment was “you’ve got to be kidding.” So that’s why UT Austin required a minimum of ten students in an undergraduate class for it to make.

After thinking about it some more, I realized how the student could have reached that point–but it is still a pathetic comment. I would guess that her lower division classes were between the 15 to 30 range with occasional big hall lectures. So she experienced an “ideal” class size that most have to wait until graduate school.

But what does that say about her ability to imagine what those “ideal” size classes will be like once they start expanding the number of students? What does it say about an institution and it’s graduates that believes the students would benefit more from a stronger “national” reputation than smaller classes?

Maybe the Rice graduates who feel like they are at a disadvantage when applying for jobs because no one knows what Rice is should consider applying to other less shallow sounding jobs. But given the comments in the report, it sounds like those are exactly the type of people Rice has been and will be recruiting.

Well, at the least students won’t have to make sure they’re prepared for their classes and will be able to select from a wide range of potential project partners after they have figured out their names.

Rice, reputation, rankings, colleges, class size