I never heard anyone ever say going to a more selective college or university increases one’s likelihood of graduating.

In fact, based on my own experience concerning friends of mine this past year, I’d say attending more selective schools, if anything, would decrease the likelihood of graduating at all or graduating on time since more selective schools are generally more rigorous and therefore make it more difficult to graduate.

A better study would have looked into a possible lurking variable to account for what might be a spurious relationship between colleges’ sensitivities and graduate rates.

Allie Bidwell of US News & World Report has the story:

Study: College Selectivity Doesn’t Improve Graduation Rates

Going to the most selective college you can gain admission to won’t improve your chances of graduating, according to a new study published by the American Educational Research Journal.

It’s been a commonly held belief that attending a more selective institution can give students the best chance of graduating, and that attending a less selective college – or being “overmatched” at a more selective one – can lower one’s chances. But the new study – by Scott Heil and Paul Attewell of the City University of New York and Liza Reisel of the Institute for Social Research in Oslo, Norway – found there is no significant correlation.

The only factor that was found to make any real difference in a student’s chance of graduating was, surprisingly, tuition. For every $1,000 tuition increased, students’ graduation chances increased by a fraction of a percent, the study found.

“Merely attending a more selective college does not make much of a difference for a given student’s chance of graduating, if all else remains the same,” Attewell, a professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, said in a statement. “Our findings call into question the argument that a given student should always prefer the most academically selective school to which she can gain admission.”