There is almost nothing that enrollment managers and CFOs and trustees talk about at private universities these days more than discount rates. Because, as I wrote recently , colleges are not-for-profits, but they're not charities; they need revenue to keep the business running because electric bills, faculty salaries, and test tubes are all paid for in cash. And while I no longer work at a private university, this is still important because the financial health of one sector affects all other members of the industry in some way. This is important information for you to know. Discount rate determines how much cash you actually receive from each student after you award institutional financial aid. If you understand discount, you can skip over the blue section below and go right to the explanation of the visualization. If not, here's how EM people think about it. Don't worry if you're confused; it is a difficult concept to understand. You charge a tuition. And you of
This post had two inspirations: First, I was scrolling around the IPEDS data center one night, looking for something to visualize that I hadn't before that I thought would be interesting. I scrolled through all the variables, and found the Academic Libraries section. I was certain that I had never even looked at the data, so put it in the back of my mind. The second thing that led me to this data was thinking about my discussions with high school counselors after they come back from campus tours: Just how often they've heard the same things from tour guides who are quite convinced the counselors have never heard it before (the blue safety lights comes to mind, along with the perfunctory mention of the number of books in the library.) The latter is not an unimportant statistic, of course, as the library has long been at the heart of the intellectual life of an institution dedicated to intellectual pursuits. But what do those numbers mean? Are comparisons between institutions