Is College Tuition Too High? Of Course (not)

You can't open a newspaper these days--at least those of you who still read newspapers--without reading something about college tuition. Usually, the takeaway from the article is something like:

It's out of control
No one can afford college any more
Most colleges charge $40,000 just for tuition

And, as is often the case, actual data can help dispel these myths. It is true, of course, that college tuition has been increasing rapidly for some time. Not 500%, as MSN suggests, especially not when adjusted for inflation. But it's gone up fast, nonetheless.

The thing most people forget is that about 78% of all full-time, undergraduate college enrollment in the not-for-profit sector attends public institutions; in fact, about 9% of all college enrollment in the U.S. is in California Community Colleges. (If you want to re-create these findings, download the spreadsheet from that link and do it yourself. The visualization is not very clear.)

Here's the data to back it up. The Chronicle of Higher Education put the data into a Tableau Software Data Visualization; I downloaded their workbook and reformatted it a bit. You can see what percentage of students attend colleges with the tuition listed, and on the bottom chart, you can see the running totals. Surprised? Don't be. College has always cost a lot less, on average, than most people think. It's the focus on the tail end that drives perception.

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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

Freshman Migration, 1986 to 2020

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Doctoral recipients by bachelor's degree-granting institution, 2016-2020

Each time I publish this visualization I get a lot of traffic on the site, and I can see why. It shows all doctoral recipients (in 2016-2020) broken out by where they received their bachelor's degrees. So, for instance, the top level view shows that UC Berkeley is the alma mater of more doctoral recipients than any other institution, followed by The University of Michigan and Cornell University. That would be interesting, but of course, these are large institutions, and it's natural to think lots of graduates will lead to lots of doctoral degrees. No surprise there. So the visualization allows you to look at the types of colleges you or your students might want: Select a state, select public or private, select by Carnegie type if you wish. You can also look at HBCUs if you'd like. Most important, you can filter by doctoral degree, so if you want to see which institution sends the most students to doctorates in chemistry, you can do so. To head off the questions I get ev

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