I wanted to apply to schools with good graduation and 1st time NPTE pass rates
The more I see this line repeated on this forum, the more I realize that this is not the end-all-be-all of school decision making criteria. If you are a quality student you will graduate and become licensed regardless where you go school. Other than a few outliers, the vast majority of schools have ultimate NPTE failure rates low enough to chalk it up to issues specific to those few students more than the school itself.
First time pass rates aren't really an objective way to compare schools. Some schools report this data, but only the three-year ultimate pass rates are universally available, and this is what schools report more often than not. If you take the NPTE repeatedly over the course of 3 years and fail to ever pass, your problem way likely bigger than the school you went to. FSBPT reports that 99% of graduates of accredited PT education programs have ultimately passed the NPTE each graduation year for the last 3 years, and 88-90% pass on their first attempt each year pretty consistently. See here:
https://www.fsbpt.org/FreeResources/NPTEPassRateReports/NPTEGraduationYearReports.aspx. When you look across the school-specific data, there are very few schools indeed that have an ultimate pass rate of less than 95%.
I know that this is contradictory to the common consensus on SDN, but I am realizing that graduation and pass rates are mostly not the mission critical deciding factors that we make them out to be, barring the few schools who's numbers in this area may be well below the norm.
For me, I wanted to go to the program that 1.) had a tuition total that was 5 figures, and 2.) had the best reputation regionally among clinicians for producing top-notch PTs. The two state programs I applied to met those criteria. The two private programs I applied to did not and were therefore back up schools. I realized the fact that all graduates of all of these schools gain employment upon graduation/licensure. The more established programs out of this group have a better reputation in the area and provide a higher quality selection of clinical sites.
I must note, however, that the schools I applied to differed so greatly in cost that that was the only deciding factor in reality. As you went from 1st to 2nd to 3rd choice, the total cost increased $30,000 each time, so really no other factors actually mattered. This of course will not be the case for everyone, but I still feel like the total cost (including moving costs, cost of living, etc) and the school's reputation for producing great clinicians should be the main deciding factors. Your fit into a program is also an important secondary consideration (for example if you really want to get into research/academics, you may select a more research-heavy program; if you really are interested in a residency program, you may want to go to the school that supports that residency, etc.). Other minor questions regarding the curriculum, class size, etc. etc. could matter in the case of splitting hairs between programs that differed by <$10k in total cost of attendance. If the cost difference is much greater than that, you're nuts to go to the more expensive one.
In the end, with all these other factors in play, I don't see NPTE ultimate pass rates being a very statistically robust way to rank program quality, as the vast majority of programs are within a few percentage points (essentially 1 or 2 students per class) of each other. Graduation rate should definitely be noted, but that can be difficult to correlate with the educational quality of the school too unless their is a consistent pattern of problems in this area over the course of several years.
Sorry for the treatise...
