Skip to main content

Where everyone gets a scholarship

I started with an interesting question: How many private colleges and universities in the country give everyone--100% of freshman--some type of institutional aid?

It was easy to get the answer: 183 of the 1,066 who have enough data in IPEDS to calculate such things. That's 17%. For some, it's understandable: Berea College, Cooper Union, the College of the Ozarks, or Olin, for instance.  They all have special populations and special funding models.  But what about the others?

I arrayed the world of private, not-for-profits on a scatter chart, on top. The x-axis is calculated mean ACT scores (the average of the 25th and 75th percentile as reported in IPEDS).  The y-axis is the draw rate, which is yield rate divided by admit rate.  It's a power measure of market position, notwithstanding some very small non-selective institutions report bad data to IPEDS that makes their draw look high.  (The average draw is about .7, for instance; but Harvard's is 14, and Stanford's is 10.5).

The bubbles are colored by a ratio: The numerator is the average amount of aid for aided students; the denominator is the average aid for all students enrolling.  If everyone gets a scholarship, that ratio is 1:1; if fewer students get aid and the aid is a small amount, it's higher.  I capped it at 3:1.

You can use the filters to look at a smaller group: Region, state, draw rates, religious affiliation, percent aided, or any variables in any combination.  If you want to see the institutions where every single freshman gets a scholarship, you can simply look at the bar charts at bottom, where that information is displayed. They're sorted by IPEDS ID because different colleges often have the same name.

And note: I started with just bachelor's, master's, and doctoral/research institutions, but if you want to add other types, use the Carnegie filter.





Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...

Educational Attainment and the Presidential Elections

I've been fascinated for a while by the connection between political leanings and education: The correlation is so strong that I once suggested that perhaps Republicans were so anti-education because, in general, places with a higher percentage of bachelor's degree recipients were more likely to vote for Democrats. The 2024 presidential election puzzled a lot of us in higher education, and perhaps these charts will show you why: We work and probably hang around mostly people with college degrees (or higher).  Our perception is limited. With the 2024 election data just out , I thought I'd take a look at the last three elections and see if the pattern I noticed in 2016 and 2020 held.  Spoiler: It did, mostly. Before you dive into this, a couple of tips: Alaska's data is always reported in a funky way, so just ignore it here.  It's a small state (in population, that is) and it's very red.  It doesn't change the overall trends even if I could figure out how to c...

Changes in SAT Scores after Test-optional

One of the intended consequences of test-optional admission policies at some institutions prior to the COVID-19 pandemic was to raise test scores reported to US News and World Report.  It's rare that you would see a proponent of test-optional admission like me admit that, but to deny it would be foolish. Because I worked at DePaul, which was an early adopter of the approach (at least among large universities), I fielded a lot of calls from colleagues who were considering it, some of whom were explicit in their reasons for doing so.  One person I spoke to came right out at the start of the call: She was only calling, she said, because her provost wanted to know how much they could raise scores if they went test-optional. If I sensed or heard that motivation, I advised people against it.  In those days, the vast majority of students took standardized admission tests like the SAT or ACT, but the percentage of students applying without tests was still relatively small; the ne...