What's All The Fuss About?

This is the week when people go crazy. The rankings come out, led by USNWR and their list of the best colleges. We all know it's a fool's game to try to rank colleges. Malcolm Gladwell's piece sheds some light on it in his usual excellent, conversational style.

But if you want to see how we as a society obsess over the smallest sliver of the the market, and how the media focus on the elite colleges, it's important to see how that market is shaped. Here are four views of IPEDS data, 2012, breaking institutions into selectivity categories. I broke selectivity into five bands: To be in the "most selective" category, you need an admission rate of 12.5% or lower. The bands then cut at 25%, 50%, 75%, and everything over 75%. The blue bars, representing the most selective institutions, are but a tiny fraction of the higher education industry. Which, of course, is why people are so fascinated with them.

This set includes only those four-year, not-for-profit institutions that admit freshmen. You can see how many colleges are in each category, how big the total enrollment is at those institutions, how many high school seniors applied, and how many eventually enrolled. Use the filters to narrow it down to region or Carnegie Classification, if you'd like.

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Changes in AP Scores, 2022 to 2024

Used to be, with a little work, you could download very detailed data on AP results from the College Board website: For every state, and for every course, you could see performance by ethnicity. And, if you wanted to dig really deep, you could break out details by private and public schools, and by grade level. I used to publish the data every couple of years. Those days are gone. The transparency The College Board touts as a value seems to have its limits, and I understand this to some extent: Racists loved to twist the data using single-factor analysis, and that's not good for a company who is trying to make business inroads with under-represented communities as they cloak their pursuit of revenue as an altruistic push toward access. They still publish data, but as I wrote about in my last post , it's far less detailed; what's more, what is easily accessible is fairly sterile, and what's more detailed seems to be structured in a way that suggests the company doesn&

Freshman Migration, 1986 to 2020

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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

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