2.131 Marketing your college
Colleges compete for students, and many students do careful research when choosing a college. One source of information is the rankings compiled by U.S. News & World Report. One of the factors used to evaluate undergraduate programs is the proportion of incoming students who graduate. This quantity, called the graduation rate, can be predicted by other variables such as the SAT or ACT scores and the high school records of the incoming students. One of the components in U.S. News & World Report rankings is the difference between the actual graduation rate and the rate predicted by a regression equation.26 In this chapter, we call this quantity the residual. Explain why the residual is a better measure to evaluate college graduation rates than the raw graduation rate.