
Top Colleges Doing the Most for Low-Income Students - Amorymeltzer
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/09/17/upshot/top-colleges-doing-the-most-for-low-income-students.html
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hackuser
Kudos to the University of California. Many other public universities are very
dissapointing. I would think that providing college educations to their
consituents, regardless of income, would be part of their missions.

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Amorymeltzer
It's worth noting that Vassar, at #8, is the leading Private university on
this list; Vassar was #1 last year. The difference? Last year only listed
schools with 4-year grad rate of 75%, this year used a 75% 5-year rate (
[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/17/upshot/college-access-
inde...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/17/upshot/college-access-
index-2015-the-details.html) ); the former only allowed two public schools.

That bears repeating: a 4-year, 75% graduation rate was better than almost
EVERY public school in the country. By that measure, the University of
California doesn't even make the list.

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digikata
If you take the Pell Grant share as a rough indication of proportion of
students that might get drop out or stretch out their study over longer times
due to financial straits, Vassar has a 22% share vs 40% for UC Irvine this
year.

Also Vassar shows an endowment per student of 32x the top public university.
So 4 year 75% grad rate is great, but note that the achievement is in the
context of a smaller proportion of pressured students and access to much
higher resources.

~~~
Amorymeltzer
My comment was more to compare last year's results and note why they were so
different. The criteria changed, that's worth paying attention to. To a
student, though, graduation rate is a very important number.

There's some interesting info here on graduation rates at the UCs, broken down
by pell and non-pell over 4, 5, and 6 years:
[http://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/chapte...](http://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/chapters/chapter-3.html#3.1.1)
Basically, there's a sizable but variable difference in 4-year graduation rate
between pell and non-pell, but that all but vanishes in the 5- and 6-year
rates.

To your second point, of course. Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford have over a
million USD per student, no public school can compare to private on those
ends.

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srtjstjsj
The methodology is overcomplicated and opaque. Why don't they just report on
the # of Pell students, instead of the total population and pell fraction?

