The Penn State Problem � The Quick and the Ed

The Penn State Problem � The Quick and the Ed

The Penn State Problem

by Erin Dillon

Ben posted last week on what I think of as the “Penn State Problem”. It’s a problem that only data nerds would spend much time thinking about, but it actually matters for parents and students. And it is important for the one, small piece of accountability (cohort default rates) that we have in our higher education system.
Ben does a good job of describing the problem in his post. I wanted to illustrate the problem with a couple charts, using Penn State as an example.
Penn State likes to think of all of its campuses as part of one, large, happy family and reports data to the Office of Postsecondary Education this way. As a result, it reports one student loan default rate–3.5%–for all of its 23