College is notoriously survivor biased, and the metrics that nearly all studies use to justify whatever they happen to be selling that day is horseshit. There are a lot of malevolent parasites that make their way into forever jobs like these. What I would personally like to see is a study of class section pass-rates that properly segment first-attempt students from re-attempt students in the metrics. The Administrati…
I majored in Statistics and Probability. By the mid 1980s, departments were starting to look at the distribution of grades. This lead to teachers giving really difficult tests and then having a large 'curve'. The problem with matching a grade distribution to the Normal Curve, is that by definition the Normal Curve is the absolute wrong goal for grades distribution. A normal distribution requires multiple inputs where none is deterministic. That is the opposite of how a class with a standardized curriculum should fall. Yes there should be variation but the use of the Normal Curve with needlessly difficult tests has caused many departments to be proud of their burn rate with incoming freshmen. In engineering then they routinely pushed out nearly half the freshmen, and had the burn continue into second year. The issue is these engineering students were also part of several 'colleges' who at the time had different policies about grades. One college didn't allow any redos, if you took a class a second time you'd get the two grades. Where another college would allow retaking the class and erasing the old grade. That school eventually merged the colleges and standardized the grading policies but I'm not sure they have any kind of redress to the engineering throwaways. These departments who have high facilities and equipment costs are what I saw pulled that the most often, they used those students whom they were actively harming more than half to subsidize their academic department.
Advice I got when I was in the search for college, "Go to the best school you can get the best grades in".