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Originally Posted by Lanny_McDonald
Thank you for saving me the time of pointing to this data source. Anyone can download the data files, but be warned, they are filled with null data and are heavily sanitized. They really are not good sources of data for obvious reasons.
As you were reviewing all of this "data", did you notice all of those "PrivacySuppressed" data points (over 19 million of them by Excel's count)? Just curious, considering it is the vast majority of the sheets in question. A lot of the data that would inform such a study, and actually provide context, is not sharable because of, you know, a certain federal law that protects against disclosure of student data, which is why it is "PrivacySuppressed." DOE has the data, but they are not allowed to release it, so trying to make general assumptions from this data is impossible without access to the complete data set. Which goes right back to the point of the response. Shoddy journalism and disinformation from a ideologically biased "think tank." And higher education is the problem, amiright?
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Well, given you previously explicitly claimed the government never released any such data, I'm glad to have saved you the time in pointing it out.
And of course you're right that not all the data the DOE collects is public, which makes sense. That doesn't mean what they do share is irrelevant or useless. For example, the columns surrounding student deaths are all private. That seems perfectly logical. However, the columns around student debt by gender are only private at institutions where the sample is small enough to be identifying (and probably not statistically significant anyway). But luckily, that leaves 4434 programs with information on student debt by gender. Seems like enough data to be useful to me, and on average institutions had a median female student debt of 6% higher than males. Do you think the fact that a rabbinical college that graduates three people per year isn't reported on privacy grounds makes the data for large public universities any less relevant?
And for the relevant income columns, the data is very complete. In fact, for the column "Share of students earning over $25,000/year (threshold earnings) 6 years after entry" there are 4676 data points. That's a lot of programs to draw a conclusion from. But this is a situation (just like Obama's reform attempts) where the academic establishment has a lot to lose from thoughtful reform. Take somewhere like Ohio's Chatfield College - only 20.9% of their students are earning more thank 25k six years later. I bet it would hurt recruiting if that was widely known. University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff comes in at 38%. Even the big state school are often only 70% - University of South Florida is 68.5%. So for that large state school more than 1 in 5 people who enter it earn 25k or less 6 years later. That's about the cut-off for SNAP (fka Food Stamps).
As to the idea that self reported incomes wouldn't be perfectly accurate, I agree with that. I also think there's no particular reason to think the skew would be in any one direction (it seems likely errors would be in both directions at the same rate and magnitude). Even if students persistently either over or under reported their income it seems incredibly unlikely that error would persistently favor one type of program or institution across a sample size of thousands of data points. So I agree the data isn't perfect, but that's a far cry from your original claim that it didn't exist and your current claim that it's useless.
What do you think of Obama's plan to tie the availability of Federal student aid to a college scorecard including outcomes? This was implemented to a certain level for for-profit institutions, but I think there are plenty of terrible non-profit ones around as well. Not to overly pick on Chatfield (mentioned above) as I doubt they're the worst, but they are a Roman Catholic institution offering non-theological degrees (not for profit). It seems like most of their students would probably be better off attending elsewhere (or not at all) and I don't see any reason why the government should be supporting such poor outcomes.