Lander, WY – After a shocking survey revealed that 75% of the members of the Wyoming Catholic College Class of 2022 want their class to shrink even more, IIT, in collaboration with the polling and statistics website FiveThirtyEight.com investigated the situation further to determine, based on several different scenarios, how big the class will be by the time it graduates.
The current trendline, or a base case of sorts, estimated based on past changes in the size of the class, sees the current juniors shrinking to around 20 students by the time they graduate, down from the current 37. “Obviously, rates of departure may change as students progress further into the curriculum, and there’s also less disgruntled students to trim,” says IIT analyst Sophia Donaldson. “However, the base case lines up very well with past long terms trends, and we think its the most likely course they will set in terms of class size.
If for some reason rates of departure increase from the Class of 2022 due to unanticipated factors (Class of 2023 offering incentives, TAC stealing away Jacob Zepp, Dr. Mortenson or the Kwas not coming back to WCC, etc.), a much faster shrinkage is likely, as a pessimistic scenario is modelled by the IIT/FiveThirtyEight collaboration. Under this scenario, the Class of 2022 loses students for the next two years at the rate of its worst losses in the past (Summer 2019, Sep/Oct 2019, etc.). If this were to happen, they would reach a final size of between one and five students, with an average of three remaining by the time they graduate.
“I don’t know how likely this is, but we have to consider it a possibility,” Sophia comments. “The Class of 2022 has surprised us before, as with their allergies to close reading and PEAKlets, the sudden and sharp decline in intra-class dating and then bump up in inter-class dating, for example. It could happen that a whole bunch just suddenly say ‘Valete’ and then go vamoose.”
A more optimistic, but also least-likely best-case scenario was also modelled that assumes that a large proportion of the Class of 2021 drops out or is in some other way forced into the Class of 2022. “Of course the Class of 2022 can’t grow, they’re too much like a leaky ship already,” Sophia adds. “Most of them will eventually leave again even if they are in the Class of 2022 for a time. “But in this case the Class of 2022 ends up at the same size it is now.”
This situation is again highly unlikely, but as it had a greater than a one in a million chance of happening, it was “though prudent at least to mention it in the model’s results” Sophia said.
Meanwhile early models of the incoming freshman of the Class of 2024, still growing even weeks after admissions to it were supposedly cut off, show it will have upwards of 100 students by the time classes start at the end of the month and will grow even further to upwards of 200 by the time it graduates.