Full disclosure, I’m an undergrad at Yale. I think that the high graduation rates at Ivy schools are fundamentally misleading in a couple of ways, if your take

Full disclosure, I’m an undergrad at Yale. I think that the high graduation rates at Ivy schools are fundamentally misleading in a couple of ways, if your takeaway is that getting a degree there must be easy. First of all, for academic and demographic reasons, most people at these schools would still have overwhelming odds of graduating elsewhere. Broadly speaking, it’s not the “dumbest” kids who flunk out, but those who are least likely to be in college in the first place. The comparison of Berkeley/MIT/Caltech is interesting in that their attrition rate is much higher than HYP etc. IMO that reflects well on academic standards for the “alt ivies”, but I think the crucial point here is to recognize that academic programs have substantial influence in this regard. Most obviously, there’s the difference in grading across fields, with STEM being the least forgiving across the board at top institutions. Thus it’s natural that the STEM dominant institutions have higher burnout. The second, less obvious piece has to do with rules around changing programs, and opportunity cost. Notably most of the Ivy schools (and many alt schools) allow students to switch majors without significant hassle. Since many “soft” majors at Ivy schools are still on the FIRE/Consulting pipeline, the natural course of action for someone who’s underperforming in a more difficult program is to remain in the institution and change their major. This isn’t necessarily true for the STEM-first schools, whose humanities undergrads are less successful winding up in a lucrative east coast industry. So I’m inclined to think it’s more about incentives than any conscious effort by the schools.