While the University of Texas at Austin spends a lot of money in court defending racism in its college admissions policies, Big Data may help solve the real problem in colleges: not who they exclude in their secret admissions sauce but the two-thirds of freshmen students that will not graduate because admission department methods are trapped in the past.
The Predictive Analytics Reporting Framework uses data on 1.8 million students from the past in order to try and predict the future. With the bare bones of a college freshman's biography, such as age, major, first in the family to go to college, military service, they can predict whether that student is likely to graduate.
American adults still lead the world in science literacy but the trend toward social engineering and the lack of cultural diversity at the faculty level has led to young adults overall being 12th, behind Korea and Russia, among others.
Can predictive analytics make the difference? Only if universities stop being about social justice and progressive good works and get back to being about education.
Colleges are hoping predictive analytics can fix their dismal graduation rates by Libby Nelson, Vox
