Final Paper

Here it is, a culmination of a semester of work. I hope you enjoyed following my posts and reading my paper. Professor Arvan, I'll send a copy directly to you, is there anything else you need me to do? Thank you so much for your help and guidance.

Analysis Rough Draft

A rough draft of my analysis can be found here, although it is a little barren. I included most of what I wanted to write and most of the graphs I want to use, but there are none of the tables I want to include. I decided to analyze UIUC transfers from Illinois Community Colleges, and the graduation rate, transfer rate, and graduation plus transfer rate of Illinois community colleges. I decided to leave out the Pathways sections for now, as the data for that section was not as good. I can always include it later if I feel the paper needs more.
My plan is to retype my whole paper in Latex for the final draft, so hopefully it will look a lot nicer and more organized. If you want some more updates on my progress, I'd be happy to give them, but otherwise I don't plan on any blog posts until I retype the whole thing. As always, any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.

Progress Report: April 21, 2015

This past week, I have been using the data I have collected in Stata to see what I could find. I made a model for estimating how many uiuc transfer students an IL community college would have, but every model had Parkland Community College as an outlier, so I made one for all schools besides Parkland. After that, I tried to create a model of IL community colleges' graduation and transfer rates based on school characteristics. My transfer model without Parkland had an Adjusted R^2 of around .85, while the school performance model had an adjusted R^2 around .60, so I was relatively happy with them.

Then I tried to use the data to check how the Engineering Pathways program effects engineering transfers to UIUC, with much less success. First, I tried to model which schools would qualify for the program, but my best model predicted less than half of the schools. This suggests that school qualification for the program is based factors other than school characteristics, perhaps state politics or personal relationships. And while Pathways schools tend to have more engineering transfers, the effect is small, averaging a little over 2 more transfers, and Pathways status has no effect on percent of engineering transfers to uiuc out of total uiuc transfers. If I were to do a section on Pathways in my final paper, it would probably reflect more on how ineffective it is.

My goal now is to start writing up my analysis in paper form, and hopefully get a rough draft within the next week or two. I'll let you know its progress in future posts.

Literature Overview and Data Set update

I have updated my data set with a variables page, it is the second one. The updated data set is here. I've started trying to use Stata to see if I can find any interesting relationships. I'll let you know how that has been going next week.

I also updated my Literature review. If you have the time, could you skim it for about 5 minutes, just to see if the format is correct. I'm worried it may sound too much like an essay, rather than a literature review. The update can be found here.

If there's anything more I should be doing, please let me know. Thanks.

Data Update

My updated data set can (hopefully) be found here. It contains all the data I used, most of it summarized on sheet 1, titled "All IL Public." All the data is from 2012. Illinois Transfer information is from the university and can be found on their website under 2012. Driving distances were found using Google Maps. Overall college data was found using College Measures. As a note, Google uses slightly different formulas, so variance and standard deviation do not show up. If you want the original copy, please comment.
I have decided to broaden my focus away from Engineering Pathways specifically and towards Illinois Community College Students overall. I want to see what makes them successful individually and specifically at getting students transferred into UIUC. My plan is to upload this data into Stata, which will hopefully make analysis easier. I will let you know how this turns out in latter posts.

Literature Overview (Draft)

Literature Review Rough Draft

The above links to a rough draft of my Literature Review. You cannot edit this one, but if you want one to edit, please email me.

Criticism would obviously be appreciated, especially on substance and formatting. Is this more or less the style you want and are there any topics I should cover more?

Thanks.

Progress Report: March 20

I think I have come up with a potential thesis topic: the UIUC Engineering Pathways program. I want to study how it is the same and/or different from the normal transfer process. I would focus on: if and how their backgrounds and pre-UIUC results differ from other transfer and native students, and try to find strengths and weaknesses of the program. Some downsides that I can see are that the university does not track transfer students differently after they arrive on campus, and potential difficulty getting data on Pathways students directly. But I think it would be useful to know how designated programs may help or hurt students.

To start I collected data from College Measures (collegemeasures.org) about the Community Colleges that are connected to the Pathways program, as well as general information about Illinois community colleges . I also found information on UIUC transfer students overall (http://www.pb.uillinois.edu/Documents/transferchars/2012/2012-Transfer-Characteristics.pdf) . Both sets of data were for 2012, and can be found summarized here.

For spring break, it intend to look more into the Engineering Pathways program: checking it's requirements, finding out how many students utilize it, etc. I will also try to find similar programs both at UIUC and other universities to compare and contrast their set up. Perhaps there has been some scholarship already on guaranteed transfer programs, so I will try to find what others have done. Finally, I want to use the data I collected to see if the chosen Community Colleges are any different from others in Illinois, and if Pathway students are any different from other transfer students.

Hopefully this is a reasonable topic for my senior thesis. Any comments would be appreciated.