Schools can have high alcohol consumption rates and reputations as “party schools,” yet still graduate student’s at a decent rate. At least that’s what appears to be the case from a comparison of the graduation rates for the Princeton Review’s top 10 beer-loving, hard alcohol drinking, and party schools versus their teetotaling peers.
Here are the graduation rates for the top 10 schools that according to the Princeton Review either drink the most or the least beer:
Now here are the grade rates based upon the top 10 that drink the most or the least hard alcohol:
As both show, the institutions with the highest alcohol consumption rate had on average, a higher graduation rate than their sober counterparts.
But what about party schools versus the institutions that are not as rowdy?
Here, the story is reversed—party schools graduate their students at slightly lower rates, on average, than “sober” schools.
What’s striking about this last list is that with the exception of West Virginia University and the University of Mississippi, all the “party” or heavy drinking schools still have decent graduation rates. Does having a party school mentality potentially decrease a school’s graduation rate? Maybe, maybe not. But what these tables all do show is that our typical conception of party schools being places of little learning—presumably one of the assumptions made by the Princeton Review—is not necessarily true. Being a party school may be bad for students’ grade point averages, but graduation rate success clearly comes down to other, unmeasured factors.
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[...] to the discussion of partying and beer affinity, the Quick and the Ed blog recently published the graduation rates of the Princeton Review’s beer-loving and beer-hating schools and found that students at beer-loving institutions had an average six-year graduation rate of 77.5 [...]
[...] partying and eighth in terms of beer affinity. The Quick and the Ed blog recently published the graduation rates of the Princeton Review’s beer-loving and beer-hating schools and found that students at beer-loving institutions had an average six-year graduation rate of 77.5 [...]
I enjoyed your exercise, Ben. Even if only for entertainment value.
Did you use enrollment adjusted graduation rate averages or simply take an arithmetic average?
First off, I’ll admit that I was 100 percent aware of the silliness of the exercise. I wouldn’t call it an analysis either. And does spending more time partying rather than studying impact performance? Undoubtedly. But most of the so-called “party schools” on the list are large public institutions where even if 10,000 students were there just to drink, you’d still have sizable populations committed to learning. That’s ultimately the biggest flaw of the Princeton Review’s rankings—it’s looking at the best 321 schools, which is just a small subset of the thousands of institutions across the country. That’s something Corey mentions, which I forgot to include while I was throwing this together.
To that end, I agree with the criticism that using grad rates isn’t 100% fair, and that we are looking at generally pretty good schools.
But we really don’t know how to address some of the issues implied by the party school label. For parents, they look at a label like that and think it must provide a bad education and they don’t want to send their student there. I’d imagine that professors don’t like having that label attached because it obscures the quality scholarship and teaching they engage in. At the same time, there are thousands of schools out there that don’t get caught in the PR book, that don’t end up on party school lists, that provide students with a so-so education. Those schools don’t get noticed and slip below the radar. And that’s without even getting into the issue of intra-institution quality.
And that’s ultimately the point that I should have conveyed in the post. The party school label, which carries significant negative connotations, is also kind of meaningless, at least as presented by the Princeton Review.
this is a silly exercise – i cannot even bring myself to even call it an analysis. why in the world would you try to interpret a dataset by only looking at the extreme values on one variable? this is only excusable if you are a freshman in college.
and you have a spelling error in the very first sentence.
I see three main problems with drawing the conclusion that partying doesn’t harm performance:
1.) You’ve left out potential mediating and moderating variables. In other words, there are a lot of other things influencing graduation too. Things like selectivity and college size, for example. Claremont McKenna and Colgate are both small, selective schools. We’d expect them to have higher graduation rates than CUNY schools almost regardless of how much beer their students drink.
2.) You’re assuming that these Princeton Review surveys are accurate. I’d think they’d at least indicate something, but I wouldn’t be shocked if a rigorous survey found that students at one or two of the top beer drinking schools actually drink less, on average, that a couple of those in the bottom ten.
3.) The book that PR publishes is designed to provide reviews of the top 10% of colleges in the U.S. So all of the three hundred odd colleges contained in the book are actually quite prestigious.
Graduation rates are a poor measure of educational quality. Schools with low standards and grade inflation often have high graduation rates. Some schools pressure professors not to give below a C regardless of how poor student work is. By contrast, MIT and CalTech have relatively low graduation rates.
The idea of “party schools” and “non-party schools” is subjective and flawed anyway. Many Bible colleges and commuter colleges are non-party schools – that doesn’t mean they have a high quality of education by any means. Some elite colleges like Duke, Brown, and Dartmouth are known for their party scenes, and that hasn’t affected their academic reputation at all. And regardless of what the general campus climate is like, students at most schools can find their own niches – at the large state schools on the party school list, plenty of students are not 24-7 partiers, and even among those who are, many of them get an excellent education.
An alternative hypothesis would be that graduation itself might be a poor measure when comparing “party” schools and “sober” schools, as lowered expectations/lowered mean test scores (students partying more than studying) might make it easier to pull passing grades in less focused schools than in more focused schools.