Does IB prepare students for college significantly better, or is it just more work, in comparison to good quality non-IB college-prep course work, including AP courses for more advanced material that IB students would take in HL courses? This assumes students with similar high school academic credentials (grades, test scores).
IBO has a paper here describing a study of IB diploma graduates versus matched (by GPA, test scores, family income, and race/ethnicity) non-IB students at UCs: http://www.ibo.org/globalassets/publications/ib-research/dp/academicperformanceofibstudentsenteringtheuniversityofcalifornia2010.pdf
However, the comparison years of enrollment were 2000-2002 (so graduation in 2004-2006 for four year graduates and 2006-2008 for six year graduates). IB graduates had slightly higher college GPAs (by 0.12 to 0.18 in first year, 0.02 to 0.08 at graduation). IB graduates had higher graduation rates from college (by 3.0% to 11.8% in four years, 1.3% to 7.4% in six years).
For the matching of the comparison group, intended major is not mentioned. But there is a table showing that interdisciplinary studies were more popular among IB graduates than among the comparison group, while biology, engineering, social studies, and psychology were similarly popular (obviously, there are lots of other majors, presumably including some more popular among the non-IB students).
Note also that the matching did not mention similar high school course selection in terms of how advanced the student was (e.g. matching a student who took IB math HL with one who took AP calculus BC in the same grade).
So, from this study, the IB graduates did better in college a decade or more ago, but not by that much. Is that difference worth the apparently large amount of extra work reported in most threads discussing IB programs? Are the study results still applicable today?
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