Ithaka Report: Measuring a Liberal Education ...

[Vkw10]

New Ithaka report, Measuring a Liberal Education and Its Relationship with Labor Market Outcomes, available at
https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/measuring-liberal-education-relationship-labor-market-outcomes/.

[marshwiggle]

Too bad the authors have never heard of graphs.

[Hibush]

Too bad the authors have never heard of graphs.

Maybe they were trained to engage with the text through deep reading, and expect others are ready to do the same.

[marshwiggle]

Too bad the authors have never heard of graphs.

Maybe they were trained to engage with the text through deep reading, and expect others are ready to do the same.

Like this? (emphasis added)

While we observe numerous significant associations between LASEO scores and institutional-level student outcomes across all four-year institutions in model 1, the associations are no longer statistically significant after the inclusion of controls in model 2. This means that the statistically significant associations are primarily driven by the different control variables.

For instance, the positive relationship between LASEO scores and institutional graduation rates is largely explained by students' prior academic achievement. Similarly, the positive relationship between LASEO scores and mid-career earnings of students is explained by parental income. On the other hand, institutional rather than student characteristics account for the positive relationship between LASEO scores and net-price-to earnings ratio. Students who attended private institutions had higher ratios than students who attended public institutions—i.e. they took longer to repay the price of attending college—because of the higher average net price of private institutions.

We also find a negative relationship between LASEO scores and intergenerational income mobility, which is mostly accounted for by two control variables: the share of students who are from an underrepresented minority group and parental income. Separating intergenerational mobility into its two components—access rate and success rate—reveals that the negative relationship between LASEO scores and income mobility is driven by the negative relationship between LASEO scores and access. That is to say, institutions with relatively high LASEO scores tend to enroll relatively low shares of low-income students.

So the LASEO score is statistically useless (by their own admission).