Today, it seems, is the day. You know the one I’m talking about. The day our national obsession with selective college admissions comes to a head. The day we check to see if any of the Ivy League Institutions (ILIs) has cracked the zero percent admit rate to which they all seem to aspire. I’m […]
Warning: If your MBTI type includes the letter F, you’re likely to not like this post. If you’ve been around a University long enough, you’ve heard about strategic planning. And at some point, you’ve heard people like me complain about strategic planning. Some typical observations: Too many people approach strategic planning like a five-year old […]
If you live in Illinois, you should know about the Illinois MAP (Monetary Award Program), which has helped millions of students earn a college degree. And you should know that almost every year, someone suggests that the funding should be removed from private universities, which they apparently think of as bastions of the wealthy. So, […]
I’ve updated my IPEDS Data Visualization. I am never completely happy with it, but I think this does a nice a job of showing important information in a concise manner. But it takes a few minutes to learn how to use it. When you click on the link, you’ll go to a page that looks […]
I like Lynn O’Shaughnessy’s blog The College Solution, because Lynn does a nice job of pulling out data and looking at things objectively. I think we need more of that. But a recent post of hers pointed out to me how frequently we use terms in higher education that are disingenuous, and how data can be misleading: […]
As I continued to think about the Claremont McKenna “scandal” and the attention it has received (including, of course, from me), some things occurred to me, not the least of which is my gut instinct that there’s no way this was pulled off by one person acting alone. Maybe more about that later. But if you’re interested, […]
A quick post…There’s been a lot of discussion about the recent revelation that Claremont McKenna College reported incorrect SAT data. Inquiring minds want to know. I used the data from the Claremont Portside article, which they re-constructed from paper reports (nice work, guys). But the data aren’t exactly accessible. I rolled it into a Tableau Software […]
As I did a presentation this morning for the President’s Council (the VP’s, Deans, and other important faculty and administrators at DePaul) on implementation progress of our test-optional pilot program, several things occurred to me: The whole test-optional discussion nationwide is really less about statistical r-squareds than it is about combating information cascades. But at the same time, […]
If you’re coming here, you’ve probably already heard that Claremont McKenna College has suffered a bit of a scandal: Dean Richard Vos has resigned after apparently admitting that he reported inflated SAT averages for the incoming freshman class for one or more years. This is not unprecedented, of course. In the interest of disclosure, I […]
I’ve written before about those who have criticized DePaul’s decision to go test-optional in freshman admissions. Much of the criticism is from people who believe that we’re doing this is to artificially increase the freshman average ACT scores we report. So I did some work to see how plausible that approach might be. And from […]
