Thread: My love of the Freshman Migration data, coupled with heavy smoke outside, coupled with the question "How can you go back to requiring the SAT when it's mostly going away in California" kept me busy this weekend.
After about three hours of trying to figure out a way to get around the Tableau restriction against using a table calculations in an LOD, I just created a table and exported to Excel and re-imported it as it was. It worked.
Here is a map of the 546 colleges outside of California that show Cali as one of their top five feeder states. That's about 30K students. The size of the indicator shows the number of freshmen from California; the digit shows the rank. A 2 means it's the second biggest feeder
Let's break that down. Not surprisingly, many institutions on the west coast rely heavily on California for freshmen. A few private institutions (blue bars) actually rely on California as the #1 feeder. These charts show rank on the left, and freshmen on the right.
Same, of course with the Southwest, especially the Arizona universities.
Rocky Mountain States? Same thing.
Less a deal in The Great Plains, but who had the University of North Dakota in the betting pool?
Great Lakes states? Pretty impressive. Remember, Purdue and Michigan were two universities that went test-optional late, and, if you read their announcements, went reluctantly. Same with Wisconsin.
South Central? Not so much.
Same for the Southeast. Duke and Emory will have some thinking to do, however.
Middle Atlantic states. NYU, of course, is sort of kind of test-confused, but there are some big hitters here who draw heavily in CA. Sure, some of these places will be full regardless. But will requiring the SATs from CA students depress apps and increase admit rates?
And finally, storied old New England, where demographics force institutions to look outside their region. This is quite the list.
If the publics in CA don't require the SAT--if they actually don't take it--will most of these students be able to take the exam easily? School day, of course, for the well resourced publics and privates. But what about everyone else? Or have I answered my own question?
Think about it a little bit, and do your own research. Many of the big institutions on the west coast or in the Southwest are already test-optional. So your pool of tested students from those states is likely to shrink.
Like I said, think about it.
How confident are you of your brand position and market power? How confident are you that students will endeavor to take the test just for the privilege of applying to your school? In the words of Dirty Harry:
Before you answer, remember that one of those New England institutions saw apps drop by 26% because--get ready--they added one additional essay question. No thread is complete without an @erichoov article.
Thread: It seems I'm spending more time telling people why I'm not too interested in the Dartmouth decision than it would take to just put it here. So here goes. I hope this is the last I'll say about it.
First, I've long said that if a college finds value in the SAT, they would be foolish not to use it. I just ask that they do the research, which Dartmouth did. And the lowest-scoring students at Dartmouth end up with a GPA of 3.1 or something like that. Horrible.
I am--frankly--a little suspicious of analysis that shows the SAT is better than HS GPA, because you know damn well if College Board or ACT could make that claim, they'd have done so long ago. They've never even whispered it.
This is the result of the DOJ investigating the NACAC Statement of Principles of Good Practice, which would have allowed this if the student had not withdrawn, but would have forbidden it if the student had notified the offering school that they had deposited elsewhere.
The DOJ treated college just like any other consumer purchase: Suppose car dealers agreed the Subaru dealer could not call you while you were on the way to the Ford dealer to buy the car you had agreed to buy, and offer you a better deal?
Thread: When someone tells you about the big drop in high school graduates, remember 2014. Because by 2037, we'll be back to numbers like we saw in 2014.
What's really compelling is the mix: America will be more diverse, and because different ethnic groups have different college participation rates, that's the big thing going on behind the numbers.
And, of course, New England has known this for a long time.
I've never received so many emails about my writing in CHE as I have for the most recent one about "The Number."
But here's a little insight into that.
Sunday morning, I logged in and checked our Tuition Deposits for Fall first-year students.
By Sunday evening (12 hours later) that number had gone up by 3.7%.
By this morning, it had gone up another 3.2% over that.
Expressed another way, 6.5% of all deposits we currently have came in during the last 24 hours. And we still have a day to go...the day that is traditionally the biggest, or at least one of the biggest.
The Daily Caller (ugh) has memos from the Florida DOE suggesting they were influencing @CollegeBoard on the AP African-American Studies curriculum as early as January 2022, and at the very minimum, July 2022.
So, to everyone who somehow believed that College Board made its own, independent decisions about the framework/curriculum and wrapped it all up in December, 2022, before DeSantis went public: Read this.
I normally wouldn't trust Daily Caller, but this serves their right wing agenda well; it's believable, and, I suspect, even they wouldn't publish a fabricated memo from the Florida DOE.
In order to win the nomination in 2024, DeSantis is going to have to do two things Trump did: