TY - JOUR
T1 - Relative success? Determinants of college graduation rates in public and private colleges in the U.S.
AU - Scott, Marc
AU - Bailey, Thomas
AU - Kienzl, Greg
PY - 2006/5
Y1 - 2006/5
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - College performance
KW - Educational economics
KW - Efficiency
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=33644914530&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=33644914530&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s11162-005-9388-y
DO - 10.1007/s11162-005-9388-y
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:33644914530
SN - 0361-0365
VL - 47
SP - 249
EP - 279
JO - Research in Higher Education
JF - Research in Higher Education
IS - 3
ER -