USNWR and the Pressure to Cheat (even just a little)

As the annual US News and World Report hype returns, as it does every year at this time, it's interesting to look at the spillover effects of it can be.

Colleges, many of whom are like hamsters on a treadmill when it comes to chasing the elusive "prestige" believe students are as obsessed with it as much as they are. And they have been known to fudge numbers to make themselves look better. Frequently one person takes the fall for this, but even if only one person is responsible, and I think that's highly unlikely, the pressure to move up is palatable at many institutions.

The case of Claremont McKenna was interesting because it was the highest-ranked institution to be exposed, and because actual data was available for analysis. I did so, and found the results almost laughable: Not because cheating is right, not because these inaccuracies didn't have some effect on the rankings (it's believed CMC was clinging to its number 10 spot and felt some heat not to lose it), not that the number 10 only seems meaningful because we use base-10 to count, but rather because the differences are so slight as to be essentially insignificant to anyone except people who don't know better. See if you agree.

Learn About Tableau

Comments

The Highly Rejective Colleges

If you're not following Akil Bello on Twitter, you should be. His timeline is filled with great insights about standardized testing, and he takes great effort to point out racism (both subtle and not-so-subtle) in higher education, all while throwing in references to the Knicks and his daughter Enid, making the experience interesting, compelling, and sometimes, fun. Recently, he created the term " highly rejective colleges " as a more apt description for what are otherwise called "highly selective colleges." As I've said before, a college that admits 15% of applicants really has a rejections office, not an admissions office. The term appears to have taken off on Twitter, and I hope it will stick. So I took a look at the highly rejectives (really, that's all I'm going to call them from now on) and found some interesting patterns in the data. Take a look: The 1,132 four-year, private colleges and universities with admissions data in IPEDS are incl

Yes, your yield rate is still falling, redux (2021)

I've been creating this data visualization, or some form of it, for several years now . I think it's most useful for higher education enrollment professionals who have to explain to people at their university why their yield rate is falling. The short answer is that applications and admits are increasing faster than student populations: If a student today applies to an average of seven colleges, compared to four colleges twenty years ago, yield rate almost has to go down. I'm sure AI will fix this, and all our problems, very soon. But I've spoken to others who use this other ways: To work with students to talk about chances for admission; to show parents how things have changed in the past twenty years; or to help journalists understand the lay of the land. Whatever you use this for, I hope it's instructive, and I hope you feel free to share it widely. And if you work in a college or university and save yourself some time by using this, or if you work with clien

Freshman Migration, 1986 to 2020

(Note: I discovered that in IPEDS, Penn State Main Campus now reports with "The Pennsylvania State University" as one system. So when you'd look at things over time, Penn State would have data until 2018, and then The Penn....etc would show up in 2020. I found out Penn State main campus still reports its own data on the website, so I went there, and edited the IPEDS data by hand. So if you noticed that error, it should be corrected now, but I'm not sure what I'll do in years going forward.) Freshman migration to and from the states is always a favorite visualization of mine, both because I find it a compelling and interesting topic, and because I had a few breakthroughs with calculated variables the first time I tried to do it. If you're a loyal reader, you know what this shows: The number of freshman and their movement between the states. And if you're a loyal viewer and you use this for your work in your business, please consider supporting the costs

Higher Ed Data Stories

Search This Blog