First off, if somebody wants to double check Lamar's numbers, be my guest, because they are atrocious across the board and I have a hard time believing they'd still get students with metrics like that.
Retention RatesI thought SFA was interesting, in that we seemed to be average amongst our peers. The Retention rate increase from 2013-2016 was nice, but I'd love to see us get it up to 80%. To me, the higher the retention rate, the more we know that we're targeting the right students and setting the right expectations so that students aren't surprised when they show up for classes.
Graduation Rates leave a lot to be desired. Our 4 year graduation rate needs to improve greatly in my opinion. While it's solidly average in our typical peer universities, and better than some, having only 1/3 of your students finish on time just doesn't seem acceptable to be. Also, I was disappointed in our most recent 6 year graduation rate. 44% of students getting a degree from the University they started out as seems far too low as well. If I, albeit with limited knowledge but thinking like a parent would view these, I'd like to see us at a 50% 4 year grad rate and a 70% 6 year grad rate. Important to keep in mind, that when it comes to Texas Higher Ed, we don't have the best graduation rates as a whole, which probably speaks as much to our K12 education quality as much as our higher education quality.
Top 10% ratesI found the Top 10% numbers very intriguing, especially when compared to overall graduation and retention rates. I haven't been able to find a direct correlation of Texas Top 10 to college graduation rates, but I'd imagine the correlation is high. Here's an article that finds a similar GPA to college graduation rate correlation.
GPA to College Graduation RateSo here's what I found interesting. Between us our our Texas peers of the same level(Sam, Corpus, Lamar, Ut Tyler), there's almost a 2x difference between Top 10 students who attend and the 4 year grad rate. Too me, that means there's a huge marketing and outreach opportunity. If we can determine the profile of the type of student who isn't Top 10, but is likely to graduate in 4 years, we can create subtargets to make sure that those students are aware of SFA and more likely to apply. So while we might not be able to compete with Texas or A&M for the very top of the class, we could build a very effective niche around students who are likely to graduate on time.
In turn, this would likely raise our academic profile, which would let SFA focus more resources on students who aren't likely to graduate on time, thus raising our quality even further.
OverallI think we still have lots of room to improve, especially since I think SFA as a teaching focused college should focus on a niche of providing a quality education for "everyone else". I feel that in Texas we have a huge "missing middle" of universities who aren't research powerhouses, but simply focus on providing a quality education across the board.