Retention and Graduation Rate Data and Models - Northeastern States
In the fall of 2014 I began a survery of Friday classes of all
schools in Massachusertts, the purpose being to see broadly how the
four day week was growing, not just in flagship schools or the Ivy
League or big cities. As I finished Massachusetts, it occurred to
me that I could get retention and graduation rates for most of these
schools and I could also get acceptance rates to control for the
quality of students. With this control I could run a mutliple
regression and measure the effect of the four day week on retention and
graduation. The results were very encouraging. While
Massachusetts was small so that it was hard to get statistical
significance, the effect was substantial and I have been enlarging the
sample ever since. The quality of the model is already impressive
and I have written a draft of a paper that I intend to publish and that
hopefully will set higher education back on a five day path.
Here is what I have so far in the order that I created it. I have
submitted a paper for publication with the hope that soon my findings
will be widely known. In the meantime, I have begun to work on Maryland.
Massachusetts
Rhode Island
Connecticut
Maine
New Hampshire
Vermont
New York
New Jersey
Pennsylvania
Here are printouts of the basic regressions that I have in the paper. Other specifications were tried, but none improved on the simple linear model.
And here is the spreadsheet that has all the data and links to sources of some of the data.