The Real Increase in College Tuition and Fees

The College Board has done a nice job of compiling and analyzing data on charged college tuition and fees; alas, as I've said before, they, like NCES, put their data in tables that are summarized and formatted for people who want to print them out. It's good information, but hard to extract any insight.

Go ahead and download the spreadsheet in the right-hand column from this link, and then go to table 5. Do you see any patterns?

It's why I like data visualization tools like Tableau Software: Not only does it make it easy to turn rows of data into something visual that tells a story; it makes it easy for me to allow you to see what you want.

This shows average tuition charges for public two-year and four-year, as well as private, four-year institutions by state, from 2004 to 2013. The charge is weighted by enrollment, so it shows what the average student was charged at those institutions. It's gross charges, before net price.

As you can see by playing with this, increases vary pretty dramatically by type, control, and region. The bottom chart shows percent change since the first year shown (you can start with any year by using the filter). And you can choose to show nominal dollars or inflation adjusted dollars. As you like it.

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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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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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