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What's with the super-high graduation rates for supposedly "hard" colleges like MIT and Yale? In a "hard" college I went to the graduation rate was _at best_ tw
by m0zg 7y ago
What's with the super-high graduation rates for supposedly "hard" colleges like MIT and Yale? In a "hard" college I went to the graduation rate was _at best_ two thirds.
- kbenson 7y agoIt's possibly a factor of how selective they can be by reputation. If the number of candidates is a few times higher than your college (which to be clear I have no idea about), then it's possible their selection criteria also selects for those likely to graduate, whether on purpose or as a side-effect of other things they attempt to select for.
- currymj 7y agothey're hyper-selective, but there's no particular reason to arbitrarily fail 1/3 of their students. you could just make the classes harder until this happens, but employers/grad schools seem to be pretty happy the way things are, so why do it? Yale students even mostly get As in most classes and it works out fine for everyone.
- sokoloff 7y agoMIT graduate here. It’s a hard school to get into. It’s not especially hard to graduate from (given that you were admitted), as long as you’re willing to grind out the work.
- m0zg 7y agoThat's the thing though, few people are willing to "grind out the work" over any extended period of time.
- kbenson 7y agoWell, being notoriously hard to get into, to the point that you have had to grind out the work/studying and also be talented to get in, probably means just keep on doing what you were.
- ianai 7y agoAgree. I went somewhere easy to get into and very very hard to get out of with a degree. You had to know your stuff. All of it.
- brians 7y agoAlso, if this is coming from DoE data, medical withdrawals are subtracted from both the numerator and denominator—on the idea they would have happened anywhere. It’s definitely not the stress, the climate, or the concrete doing it. IHTFP.
- uwuhn 7y agoAs someone who has never been to grad school, I assume this is how most grad programs work too.
- Spooky23 7y agoNot sure about MIT, but Ivy League schools have always inflated grades. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I went to a state school that had bell curve grading. Brutal.
- waylandsmithers 7y agoThese kids mostly got straight As and perfect SAT scores in high school, so I don't think it should be that surprising that it continues in their college studies also. I think it kind of depends on whether you think students should be evaluated on their own or in comparison to the rest of the class.
- Rebelgecko 7y agoLots of schools that are hard to get into try to make it (relatively!) easy to graduate. The average GPA at Harvard is like 3.7. I do wonder if part of it is to prevent students that were really successful in high school from having imposter syndrome when they don't get straight As in college.
- osamagirl69 7y agoI went to MIT for grad school. At the prospective student orientation, the admissions committee stood up in front of us and said (paraphrasing since this was a decade ago) >after careful deliberation we have concluded everyone standing in the room has what it takes to graduate, and that we consider it our duty as a department to ensure that everyone who is admitted does graduate. We are committed to provide you whatever resources--be it academic, financial, emotional, etc--you need to graduate, and we want you to focus on doing the best possible possible research. Needless to say I picked them over Stanford, where it was a battle royale to see what 2/3 of the class would graduate. Got out in 4 years for my masters/PhD and loved every minute of it.
- madengr 7y agoYep, 70% percent of my freshmen engineering cohorts had flunked out by 4th year.