Searching for the right college is a very important decision incoming student's make and has a massive impact on the development of careers. It's common that student's will view up to almost 10+ schools before they finalize their decision, and it often comes down to the finite details that have the most influence. One thing I overlooked when deciding the college I wanted to attend was the graduation rate. Quite an easy stat to look up and view, I wasn't really aware at the time of what that really implicated. Tuition isn't inexpensive, so when paying for college you really hope you're getting all the bang for your buck. Now that I'm years into my college career and have a better understanding of how these two variables coexist, I wanted to plot out these statistics onto a graph and visualize how they interact with each other to see if their are any correlations I can draw from it. After looking at major schools in the state of Pennsylvania, I found that these two variables may have a positive correlation between them. In most cases, it appears that schools with a higher tuition relative to others will have the higher graduation rates among students. As you can see from the graphs below, schools like Carnegie Mellon, Westminster, and Duquesne all have relatively high tuitions alongside high graduation rates. On the contrary, schools like Indiania, CCAC, and Edinboro all have significantly smaller tuitions as well as smaller graduation rates. However, there is definitely evidence that suggests the correlations aren't that strong. Robert Morris for example, which is a private university, has almost double the tuition of a school such as Slippery Rock, yet has a smaller graduation rate by about 5 percentage points. Why is this the case? Its certainly a question that requires an in depth analysis of both schools, but it is still interesting at the surface level and invokes some type of curiosity on the matter.
The website Valuecollege.com, a website that gives general college information to those seeking, states that schools with high tuition's generally have low acceptance rates. This means they're only accepting elite students who are understandably more likely to finish their degrees, so that can be attributed to the high graduation rates. It's quite difficult to determine if graduation rates and tuition are good determiners of the quality of a school, however, it is still interesting data that can give students information to help them decide where they want to spend their hard earned money. Overall, I believe that their is a correlation between graduation and tuition that students should be aware of when deciding their university to attend. I surely wouldn't make it the largest or even a large factor in deciding, however it will certainly help you prepare for the long run. Sometimes, a couple hundred or thousand dollars can have a huge impact on your ability to attend a university. Finding a school you know has a solid graduation rate that costs slightly less than the school you were likely to attend may be all the difference it takes to change your mind. On the other hand, there could be plenty of other factors that are more important. Hopefully this helped some students in search of a college better secure the college they want to pursue.
