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University of Arizona Tracks Student ID Card Swipes To Detect Who Might Drop Out (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: The University of Arizona is tracking freshman students' ID card swipes to anticipate which students are more likely to drop out. University researchers hope to use the data to lower dropout rates. (Dropping out refers to those who have left higher-education entirely and those who transfer to other colleges.) The card data tells researchers how frequently a student has entered a residence hall, library, and the student recreation center, which includes a salon, convenience store, mail room, and movie theater. The cards are also used for buying vending machine snacks and more, putting the total number of locations near 700. There's a sensor embedded in the CatCard student IDs, which are given to every student attending the university. Researchers have gathered freshman data over a three-year time frame so far, and they found that their predictions for who is more likely to drop out are 73 percent accurate. They also have plans to give academic advisers an online dashboard to look at student data in real time. "By getting their digital traces, you can explore their patterns of movement, behavior and interactions, and that tells you a great deal about them," Sudha Ram, a professor of management information systems who directs the initiative, said in a press release.
The article is void on information on what specific statistics indicate a student is more likely to drop out. Are students who use their ID card to go to the rec center more likely to drop out over students who us it to enter the library? The article doesn't say.
Okay, I was going to dump on this, because the TheVerge article sucks. The press release, however, actually does a good job discussing some of the signals they track and how this ties into them. They even have a nice visualization of student traffic which hints at some ways that they might be able to infer stuff from all of it.
As an aside, the article contains this horrible quote (I really hope there's some missing context):
We think ...[we're] sort of doing what Amazon does — delivering items you didn't order but will be ordering in the future
I'm sorry, but I do not recall Amazon ever doing that. Quite frankly, I'd consider it really awkward to receive things in the mail based on what they thought I might need.
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
Although like most states, they have state funding cuts to deal with, they are still using more than tuition dollars. Not wasting grants/endowment returns and state money is all part of this. In a sense, the student is also the product, since they're not footing the whole bill.
why do I have to go an big lecture class even more so for the filler ones or ones where you just need cram for the test. I want to take classes I want to learn and not stuff I will never use.
Bayesian solutions should be capable of >80%.
The alledged wisdom of the crowds should get close to Bayes.
73% is a miss. They should take a class.
student athletes miss a lot of it. Hell if they make to the final 4 then that a lot + time missed to get it.
Although like most states, they have state funding cuts to deal with,
Lies, lies, lies.
The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much
It isn't, especially when the grade inflation is so bad the most commonly awarded grade is an A.
The SAT and ACT are good predictors. I suppose you could ace them even if you hate school with a burning passion, and many people do. But few people who hate it enough to drop out would bother to.
public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars
What about student-population adjusted dollars? There are more students in college today - both due to population growth and higher college attendance rates.
I doubt this is good enough. There is grade inflation of course.
But I don't think that it is the real problem. You only get grades twice a year because most universities are on a semester system.
Therefore, it could take a year before you actually get the data you need to make a decision. By then it is probably too late.
The problem is that grades won't make the difference between:
-These were really tough classes for me.
-I got sick and could not quite follow.
-my mom lost her job and I needed to start working flipping burgers.
Only the third case is really a cause of dropping out.
Because it's a university. If you just want to learn what you want to learn, take a trade school.
University students are expected to take courses (ok, forced) in non-subject areas, usually called "complimentary studies" or other terminology. This helps produce more well-rounded students who have a breadth of knowledge rather than a rather narrow specialized field. This knowledge is designed to help one see their place in the world, or at the very least, ensure one mingles around with different sets of students. It's why the engineering classes always require classes from the fine/liberal arts and business classes, and which the reverse is true too.
At the very least, take business classes if you can. Economics and introductory management classes are very useful if one gets in the position of having minions.
Read the article, it talks about that too. The article claims the $/student is higher than in the 60s, but dropped somewhat from the 90s.
Also the article claims that the administrative layers became bloated in the universities.
This match what I see in practice; though I haven't crunched numbers.
There is less money per student than there used to be; I wasn't around in the 60s but it certainly feels like there is funds than 20 years ago.
Also a lot of funds these days go to what I would call non academic expenses like a gyms, student health centers, on-campus dining options. While I understand the value of these, they pull money away from running classes.
The number of administrators we have today seems also a lot higher than it used to. I am not always sure what the administration actual contribution is; it is hard to tell.
Most universities have athletics departments that make sure their students are going to class and doing their work because they have academic eligibility requirements. Sure, if you're a school that's in the top ten it wouldn't surprise me if that gets bent a bit or that the university has shuffled those athletes into underwater basket weaving degrees that aren't particularly rigorous, but it isn't happening for the vast majority of athletes at the majority of institutions.
The only programs generating millions of dollars are football, hockey (for the limited number of schools that have teams), mens basketball, and perhaps women's basketball for a small number of schools. The rest are money pits and no one is going to run the risk of cooking the books for someone on the women's rugby team or men's cross country team.
I don't think that's a problem if the content hasn't been dumbed down to make it possible for no effort on the part of most people to be able to get an A. Distributing the grading so that only a certain percentage can get an A is utterly pointless. I had a statistics class like that where the professor did something like that and it was practically impossible to get anything other than a D, C, or B. This resulted in a lot of people who had very similar grades (and a good understanding of the content) but it was basically preordained that only 2 people in the class could earn the grade.
AC a person who studied and used the library and lab a lot might have good grades.
A person who did not use the library and lab much might also have good "grades".
Nice to have another way of considering who to hire.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I'm surprised that the researchers didn't start to run into university politics before they published their result -- namely, that the University is using data to segregate students and preferentially help some students and not others.
Many a data science / predictive algorithm study has been sunk because university administrators think it singles out people, even if it is to help them.
This helps produce more well-rounded students who have a breadth of knowledge rather than a rather narrow specialized field.
That's certainly the concept, but AIUI European universities don't do anything like this, and their graduates don't seem to have a worse general fund of knowledge than equally-educated Americans. I sure as hell didn't get all that much out of my "distributional" requirements. The really interesting stuff that was outside my major didn't count toward them - I think I was one class away from a minor in classics when I graduated.
Millions of tax free dollars but wait, exactly why the fuck are they tax free dollars if the jock strap douche baggery has nothing what so ever to do with education.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I didn't say it was perfect, but I am pretty sure that someone who gets a 25th percentile SAT score ain't gonna last too long at a top-25 university, no matter what rocks-for-jocks major he tries to slink through with. It won't catch the 1600 SAT nerd who drops out after two years to start a billion-dollar business, and it won't catch the type-A overachiever who has a mental breakdown after three semesters of 72 credit-hours and zero sleep hours a pop, but standardized tests have their place, along with grades, and other stuff that makes its way onto a college application in gauging who's more likely to succeed and who isn't.
So a boss and company, gov, mil knows a person wanting a job later can study and showed they can be punctual and can manage time.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Systems like this are everywhere now.
For example, here in the Netherlands a similar system is used in Dordrecht. It's extremely untransparant, where the makers say they want to avoid the hassle of a public debate..
Source: https://www.groene.nl/artikel/...
China is another obvious example. They use data to pinpoint students with potential psychological issues.
Source: https://www.volkskrant.nl/buit...
Big data is feeding our impulse to be risk averse. The question is what this does to students in the long run. See also:
https://www.socialcooling.com
So school does prepare for life. Because out in the real world, nobody gives a fuck which of the three was your reason to not perform as expected either.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
How, by having my card at certain places at certain times? If anything, it proves that I can get people to do stuff for me.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They also generate millions of dollars in revenue for the school...
If the sport is football and the school is doing average to good, then the school would be profiting. Basketball? Your school needs to do well or no profit. Baseball? Not so much. Though, not every school has a football team. Besides, not every school has a good sport team. As a result, not many schools are actually making money if you are talking about number of schools in the US.
I get that students are responsible adults but when they are paying tens of thousands for their education, surely their tutors should be the ones noticing this, not a data mining operation?
That has more to do with the kind of people who get into Harvard or Yale than the kind of education that goes on there.