Abstract
Amid growing criticism of public universities, there is little discussion of what appropriate institutional evaluation would entail. Six-year graduation rates are commonly used, and public bachelors granting institutions have lower rates than private institutions, but with the growth in non-traditional college attendance, these can be misleading. We develop a regression analysis as a way to evaluate institutions serving vastly different populations. We do this with a dataset constructed from publicly available sources and focus on the evaluation of public colleges. We show that public colleges are able to do more with less: our models suggest that with equivalent resources and student populations, public schools would graduate a slightly larger percentage of students than privates. Since financial resources come from very different sources, we evaluate this finding closely.
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Scott, M., Bailey, T. & Kienzl, G. Relative Success? Determinants of College Graduation Rates in Public and Private Colleges in the U.S.. Res High Educ 47, 249–279 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-005-9388-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-005-9388-y