Super Publics, Part 3
Certain public universities are attracting high-scoring students. Why? We hypothesize.
Earlier posts in this series have examined enrollment shifts at schools in the University of California network and certain east coast universities showing underpublicized “magnet” effects, where students with high board scores tend to enroll at certain public institutions. Why is this happening? We’ll venture two different – but not mutually exclusive - possibilities. Before doing so, it’s worth looking at the elite institutions which have traditionally enroll high academic achievers, because their actions appear to play a roll in the growth of the Super Publics.
As is well known, established Ivy League universities and other highly selective schools are not materially expanding the sizes of their undergraduate programs. Our Ivy+ group of well-endowed, highly selective institutions increased its enrollment size by under 1% per year in the previous decade.
Add constrained supply to sky-high demand and — voila! — pricing power. Price inflation at the already expensive Ivy+ group rose at approximately twice the rate of college inflation nationwide in these years, and significantly faster than general economy-wide inflation rates. If anything, the trend has intensified since the pandemic.
Big city satellites
What do Binghamton, Rutgers, UC Santa Barbara and the University of Maryland have in common? Geography. All are in or near pricey metro areas, where even high earning middle class families face financial pressure from expensive real estate, high state taxes and prohibitive (hello New Jersey!) local property taxes. Labelling them “Super Publics” mimics the term “Super Zips”, coined by controversial scholar Charles Murray in his depressing 2013 book, Coming Apart. Super Zips are clusters of neighborhoods with disproportionately wealthy and highly educated residents, usually suburbs of thriving cities, with many located in the northeast and on the Pacific coasts. Super Zips are desirable places to live and hence they are expensive, with many residents stretching their finances to afford them.
Residents of Super Zips are one of higher education’s base customer segments, and their finances present a problem which the higher ed financing system hasn’t successfully mitigated. College list prices and student financial aid awards are not adjusted by location, which means that the higher cost of living in a place like Los Angeles doesn’t reduce either college’s actual market (net) price or the Federal statutory need calculations (the Student Aid Index). And that in turn means affording college tends to be more difficult for middle class students living in these metro areas. They face the choice of either gaining acceptance to the very few highly selective schools that meet full need – ones that are ever more hard to get into – or of looking for alternatives. As they consider these alternatives, they appear to be detecting the fact that some of their state’s public universities are developing an improving reputation, along with presenting a welcome blend of quality academics and financial benefits. Our second conjecture covers how word of these improvements spread. Before we elaborate on this second conjecture, let’s just posit for now that information about improving student outcomes is communicated quite efficiently among potential applicants these days. (In a post from last year, for example, we found that student knowledge of improving student satisfaction at Cal Poly Pomona was sensed by potential applicants before the actual data became widely known or even before it was reported by the federal government.)
One metro area that has seen a spiraling cost of living and general wealth is Seattle. It so happens that the University of Washington’s main campus in Seattle has, like some other schools, shown impressive gains in student test scores. Readers may recall that we labelled UW the best public university in the Northwest in our kickoff piece on student retention. A positive feedback loop of abnormally high retention, higher testing incoming students and stable selectivity and yield testifies to the university’s organizational success over the last decade.
UW has a sister campus in the very western part of the state, Washington State, located in Pullman, close to the Idaho border. Washington State sits in a rural area and exists in a very different economic milieu than Seattle, with its Microsoft and Amazon headquarters. Has Washingon State seen the same rise in test scores as UW? We don’t see it.
None of this is conclusive, but it does suggest that one campus, located in a wealthy and expensive metro area, displays big SAT rises in the higher-testing part of its student body, while another campus, in a rural area, shows if anything a deterioration in scores. Parallel patterns exists in the CUNY/SUNY system, where the schools near the wealthier New York City and Long Island region are enrolling surging numbers of high testing students while the University at Buffalo, in a cheaper and more depressed area, has shown a much smaller increase. We mark this hypothesis - that a surplus of high testing students from super zips are self-selecting into certain public universities - as likely but unproven.
The Magic of Naviance
Information about colleges appears to spread by word of mouth pretty efficiently nowadays. One resource for more specific knowledge is Naviance, currently owned by PowerSchool. Naviance was launched in 2002 so it is a fairly new software package. It has shown rapid growth and is now used in most US high schools. Implementing the software is one thing; students adopting and learning to interpret the data is another. We believe this skill is evolving, with reliance on Naviance being mentioned frequently in client discussions, in our experience. So it is fair to say that Naviance is being used more intensively these days and, especially in its scattergrams showing where their high school’s past graduates have attended college, provides information that students wouldn’t have had even 15 years ago.
Consider a hypothetical student in Westchester County, New York in 2005. That student would hear word-of-mouth comments about various colleges, could consult the US News rankings and could attend college promotional events. But they wouldn’t know that SUNY Binghamton had more higher-testing students than, say, SUNY Potsdam or Buffalo. There would probably have been a vague awareness that Binghamton was the “better” school, but it would have been qualitative commentary and perceived as only somewhat reliable. Fast forward, that student in 2024 would know exactly how many students from their high school had attended Binghamton and would often possess precise information on those students’ standardized tests and grade point averages. If you have the data, the difference between Binghamton and Potsdam is crystal clear. Qualitative comments are now reinforced by loads of numbers.
Why would this matter? Many “Super Publics” don’t see any change in their admissions rate and selectivity despite rising board scores. That makes the self-selection process by applicants key in all of this. A student with comparatively low test scores and GPA will conclude from Naviance that graduates from their school with better scores and GPAs are the ones attending a given Super Public and perhaps refrain from even applying, given that admissions offices pay careful attention to how many students from each high school are admitted. Meanwhile, a high scoring student will now know that quite a few academic achievers from their high school have already gone off to Binghamton. That makes Binghamton not any old public university, but one that is set apart and worth considering. Hypothetically, there may be a sort of tracking going on here, but not one imposed by an administration, one developed by the students themselves in an emergent process.
Naviance amplifies word of mouth with real data. The students self-sort before even applying, do it using vastly more information than a high schooler a generation ago and, as a result, a few public universities, often not far from the student’s home, gradually become magnets for high testers. That’s the hypothesis in a nutshell.
Final Comments
A subset of large public universities have seen fast rising standardized test scores from its highest testing students. Although not all institutions showing these increases are located close to a big expensive metro area – for example, the University of Florida in Gainesville reports a strong 105 increase in its conformed SAT/ACT at the 75th percentile level – most are nearby.
Score increases often aren’t reflected in declining admissions rates, implying self-sorting by high school students. We hypothesized that Naviance, a widely-deployed software module, has reshaped the enrollment market with its fire hose of information. Students are now using information from the system’s scattergrams to sort themselves before even applying.
College applications are partly about learning to shop? Shopping today, for anything from a house to a Caribbean vacation to a lawnmower, often relies on online sources with loads of data. It’s no surprise similar trends are appearing as people apply to college. Applicants are bombarded with information and promotions. Where to apply and enroll is a major decision, with significant sums of money and life impact in play, so the application process mimics future big ticket decisions. Intelligent interpretation of information can often have a big positive impact in such situations. It’s no surprise that many academically capable students - who have been carefully completing their high school requirements and systematically building towards a long-term goal - turn to this firehose as they investigate their postsecondary choices.
Not all public and private colleges are showing these rises. We looked at Washington State, located in a rural area far from any Super Zips, which may have seen a deterioration in its upper scores. Another non-riser is worth noting: Colgate. In a piece on the 2022 admissions cycle, we saw that Colgate may be the hottest name in the US in terms of surging student interest. Interestingly, Colgate – which is fairly near Binghamton and similarly accessible from New York City – has shown no statistically meaningful increase in its Top 75th percentile entering student scores in the 2010s, a period when it became much more selective. This suggests that high private college prices are one driver helping the Super Publics. If more analysis will be needed to strengthen this possibility, the logic is that even a very popular and expensive private college like Colgate has difficulties recruiting more of these high testing applicants because the price is just too high. An alternative possibility is that Colgate practices a holistic and less quantitative admissions practice than more thinly-staffed public universities and is satisfied with the testing of its students - hence no rise in average scores. But we lean towards the first alternative: that expensive private colleges are admitting fewer and fewer of their applicants and at the same time are losing competitiveness as their price tag inflates. Determining what is happening here will demand more analysis but, to insert a qualitative observation, it’s common knowledge that scads of high-performing students don’t even consider applying to Ivy+ schools. These are the people who instead increasingly attend the Super Publics.
Appendix: 2011 v 2019
Before we end, let’s take a look at the top 20 75th percentile test scores among large public universities in 2019 and contrast it with the equivalent 2011 list. The top 4 shouldn't surprise most readers - we encourage you to mentally list what these top 4 public universities are in the US based on their student academics before you even glance at the charts below and believe you will get them mostly right. But it's the set of schools right behind these top universities that will bring surprises.
2019’s top 20 looks like this:
The top 4 were as expected, but it’s interesting that, among the top tier, 3 public universities near the Washington DC metro area score impressively. The appearance of the University of Maryland at #6 came as surprise. UMD showed few gains in its scores across the decade not attributable to the 2017 SAT re-norming, so it’s been largely flat - but flat at a high level.
The appearance of the University of Texas-Dallas was notable. This 18,000 student undergraduate program located in Richardson showed 70-80 point improvements in both its 25th and 75th percentiles. While the Austin campus gets the publicity, the Dallas campus test scores are statistically indistinguishable from it. This trend - that testing gains are extending into select non-flagship public unis - aligns with our comments about UMass Lowell and UNC Charlotte in part 2 of this series.
Finally, please observe how Purdue has surged in the last decade, displaying sharply raised results in its higher-scoring cohort. As with the other examples, this rise in scores is not tied to lower admissions rates; students are self-selecting into Purdue’s applicant pool. If Chicago isn’t as expensive as Los Angeles or New York, it is still relatively high priced and so conforms to our matching of Super Zips with Super Publics. The University of Illinois also saw higher test scores, although less than Purdue. Illinois is an SAT state so some of the rise is due to the College Board’s re-norming.
How does this top 20 compare with earlier in the decade? Here are the 2011 results:
What’s changed?
The top universities haven’t shifted much, although UNC Chapel Hill had a meaningful drop in this ranking (spot 6 in 2011 dropping to 11 in 2019).
UC Santa Barbara made the most rapid ascent in this group, not rating in 2011 (it was right under the cut-off) and climbing to the 9th position in less than a decade. Stony Brook and the main University of Washington campus in Seattle were also big risers.
The University of Wisconsin Madison displayed the most disappointing results. It showed no increase in its top 75thpercentile factoring in the SAT re-norming. In a previous piece, we pointed to the fact that Madison’s retention now showed no material retention/selectivity difference from two of its Big 10 (14? Have they expanded to Europe yet?) rivals, Minnesota and Ohio State. There’s a bit of a dip here in Madison’s relative performance.
Ohio State and Clemson dropped out of the top 20, replaced by Rutgers and Purdue. Overall, this ranking is quite static. Higher ed is a slow-changing, stable business.