Ignoring Non-Traditional Students Invalidates Most College Ratings

If you’re eliminating a big chunk of the population that you say you’re serving with the scorecard, it’s going to kill the results. It has a huge impact on the scorecard’s effectiveness. There is another scorecard system that has been developed by the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities (APLU) called the Student Achievement Measure (SAM). They take into account that there are mobile students who enroll in multiple institutions or who transfer and then graduate. The traditional way of counting only the graduation rates of first-time, full-time students really doesn’t show the true picture and it can really have an negative representation for some institutions. The SAM tracks student movement across various postsecondary institutions. A link between the the scorecard and SAM would be good because that would give us a more complete picture of how an institution is doing in terms of student success and completion.