USD Tops Academic Progress Report; Mines 2nd, SDSU 3rd

Also on today’s Regental agenda is a discussion of students meeting academic progress standards on our public university campuses. 92% of our undergrads finished the 2014–2015 school year in good academic standing, up a snudge from previous years:

USD appears to have the most studious students, with 94.1% of the ‘Yotes in making the grade. They beat the slide-rule jockeys at Mines (who may respond that their engineering classes are harder) and the Jackrabbits (who have no excuse for letting USD outperform us on any positive measure—none! Hit those books!)

The lowest academic performers are our two smallest general campuses. Both Northern and Black Hills State fail to post more than 90% in good academic standing.

The Regents break down academic standing by admission codes—i.e., students meeting the normal admission requirements and other groups.

Top performers are those who met all admission requirements and came to campus with 24 credits or more already under their belts. That would include our young dual-credit gunners who load up on college course for cheap in high school. Good work, kids!

The groups admitted with exceptions to the admission requirements predictably have more students not reaching good standing. So does the GED/home-school cohort—though alas! the report does not distinguish the home-schoolers, from whom we would expect great things—from the GED recipients.

Older students, our non-trads, are underperforming their younger campus-mates, with only 84.3% in good standing. I always found non-traditional classmates a touch more serious about studies, but perhaps overcoming teenage hormones and the novelty of beer is outweighed by the increased likelihood that non-trads have more family and job obligations.

p.s.: That second to last admissions cohort, the ISIS group? That’s “Integrated Student Information System,” the first centralized, cross-campus system the Regents had for tracking students.