As we worked on putting things together we spent some time talking about the fact that when students are searching for a college, digging into data isn't always high on the list of things to do. It is much more fun to explore the campus and meet with a professor and decide that this is "THE" school for you. And yet the data has a valuable story to share as well.
What do I mean?
Think about Retention Data. Information regarding retention rates means how many students who start at the college on the first day of their freshman year come back the following year. This is important to know because it gives you an idea of how happy and successful students are on the campus. Students that get accepted and go only to find that they are completely over their heads at the school might not have built the study and organization skills needed to be successful and so they might not return for the next year. Or students may attend thinking every day would be fun and forget that there is a lot of work involved with college too and so they might elect not to return to school because they didn't enjoy it as much as they had hoped. Sometimes it is because the college is not a good fit for them after all. And so if you notice that a college has a low retention rate it doesn't mean you won't like the school, but it may be a reason to pause and really look in depth to make sure you are going to be happy and successful at the college.
Another critical piece of data is how long it will take you to graduate. Most of the WKHS graduating students anticipate that they will be in college for 4 years. And that would be great. But that doesn't always work out for students in the long run. This can be due to a range of factors including how easy or difficult it is to get the necessary classes for graduation.
The https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/ website provides user friendly tools to search for colleges and explore their data.
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