School Evaluation‐The Case of the College
Based on a cohort study of more than 44,000 students who began their college studies in the fall 2009 semester and involving the main academic and socioeconomic variables likely to influence academic success, this article evaluates the influence of institutions on graduation. Using a subtractive approach and multilevel mixed logistic regression models that consider the most important individual and compositional variables, the results obtained support the hypothesis that colleges and programs exert a statistically significant influence on academic success and explain a significant portion of the observed variance. The results also show that ratings of institutions that are found in rankings based only on aggregate data and in which the main factors influencing academic success are not neutralized, are highly biased, and that, in college education, compositional effects are either modest or negligible. These results, therefore, do not support the hypothesis of an unequal Quebec education system for the college level and call for equivalent, subtractive, and multi-level studies to be conducted for the other levels of education to contribute to a better understanding of all the factors that determine academic success and performance.