Yesterday, in my english class, a colleague of mine presented about the benefits that private and public colleges offer. His research was very interesting to me because it intertwined with my research, which is about diversity on college campuses. His research broke the debate down into three different categories.
Cost and Size
Obviously private colleges cost more, on average, than public schools do. This is because in-state tuition at public colleges is so low. However, a very interesting point that was brought up was that private schools tend to have a better four-year graduation rate. This makes the long-run cost of attending private schools less than it might seem initially. Hopefully, in your first year out of college, or fifth year after starting school, you will be making money which will help pay for some of the cost of attending college. Conversely, it may take you 5 years to graduate at a public school, which would mean that instead of making money in your fifth year, you are spending another year paying college tuition. A reason why private schools tend to have better graduation rates may be the class sizes.
Private schools tend to have small classes which allows students to have more discussion based classes. Additionally, you get to know your professors which is an invaluable asset to have when you inevitably get confused by the material that you are learning.
Diversity
The most interesting part of my colleague’s research was about diversity. He was looking at the retention and graduation rates at colleges and how they related to diversity of campuses. This is where my own topic helped fill in some gaps. I found an article in my research that found a positive correlation between college diversity and first-year GPA as well as freshman to sophomore retention rates. This seems to show that diversity is extremely important for colleges and raises the question: which type of school, private or public, has greater diversity?