Now what am I doing wrong? (reviews, graduating, students, ranking)

[prpinrni]

So in my last post, I was confused as to way most students were the traditional age when graduating from a certain college even though there were statistics saying that the majority of people did not graduate on time from that college. I now realize that my mistake was that I assumed everybody who didn't graduate on time eventually graduated rather than dropping out altogether. So then I looked up people who started at that college at a certain time, and almost everyone I looked up graduated 4 years later. For instance, according to this link, Sonoma State University (SSU) - Reviews & Rankings, only 27% of people who start at Sonoma State University graduate in 4 years, yet almost everyone I looked up who started at Sonoma State graduated in 4 years. It was the same with several other college. What am I doing wrong?

[GeorgiaTransplant]

Originally Posted by prpinrni

So in my last post, I was confused as to way most students were the traditional age when graduating from a certain college even though there were statistics saying that the majority of people did not graduate on time from that college. I now realize that my mistake was that I assumed everybody who didn't graduate on time eventually graduated rather than dropping out altogether. So then I looked up people who started at that college at a certain time, and almost everyone I looked up graduated 4 years later. For instance, according to this link, Sonoma State University (SSU) - Reviews & Rankings, only 27% of people who start at Sonoma State University graduate in 4 years, yet almost everyone I looked up who started at Sonoma State graduated in 4 years. It was the same with several other college. What am I doing wrong?

If I understand your question correctly, you are confusing the statistic describing the overall population - "27% of people who start graduate in 4 years" with the data describing your sample - "yet almost everyone I looked up graduated in 4 years."

The specific instances you looked up are in that 27%. That's just the way it works sometimes. If you could look up all people who started Sonoma state, you'd find 73% of them did NOT graduate in 4 years. You just didn't happen to look up anybody in that 73%.