Doctoral Degrees Awarded, 2012

I continue to find good and interesting data in the new release of the NCES Digest of Education Statistics. Although it's not yet complete, tables are being published as they are ready.

Again, the good folks at NCES provide a great service, but they still think in terms of 1996: That people want reports they can print off and study. That may still be true for many people, but I do hope they provide information in a more viz-friendly format at some point in the not-too-distant future. This visualization is a combination of two of those formatted reports, after considerable scrubbing and cleaning of the data.

It shows doctoral degrees awarded by US Institutions participating in Title IV programs in 2012 by gender, ethnicity, and discipline. The top chart is a bubble chart (notwithstanding the objections of data visualization experts, for good reasons) and the two bottom charts are bar graphs, colored by ethnicity and gender.

You'll notice right away two things, I bet: First that purple (degrees awarded to Caucasians) dominates, and second, we produce a lot of degrees in law and health.

You can filter by ethnicity or gender or specific discipline if you'd like (all three charts will update), but instead try this: Use the "Degree Popularity" slider to eliminate the top two or three disciplines on the bubble charts.

Lots of good stuff here, if you're wiling to spend a little time working on it. And yet, there is much that could be visualized that's not. What would you like to see?

Learn About Tableau

Comments

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...

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...

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...

Higher Ed Data Stories

Search This Blog