Skip to main content

More on Net Costs

In the continuing debate about college affordability, another way to look at the problem.

This is once again IPEDS data from FY 2011, the most recent available for financial aid and net price.  It shows, on the top chart, the net price for students at every college or university in the US, sliced three ways: Net price for students with family incomes (adjusted gross) over $110,000 in blue; net price for students from family incomes between $48,000 and $75,000 in gold; and net price for students from family income of under $30,000 in red.  They are sorted from the top by the blue bar, in descending order.  For reference, on the right of the top chart is the percentage of freshmen with Pell Grants (in orange).  In congratulating an institution for doing well on low-income students, it's also important to consider how many of them they enroll in the first place.

On the bottom, the same net price data is shown as a percent of family income.  But since we don't really know what the average income is for students in any band, use the blue parameters on the right to estimate. You may think that the average for the Under $30,000 band is $10,000, for instance, or that it's $25,000. It's your choice for all three bands.  The bottom chart updates as you change the input.

Use the filters on the bottom to select smaller groups: You may only want to look at universities in the South, or in Wisconsin, or the most selective, or just research universities.  There's no limit.

Eager to hear your take on this.  Reminder: Income is only available for students who complete a FAFSA; and, as usual, all the caveats about the reliability of the non-adjudicated IPEDS data apply.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

The College Finder

Note: A few people have commented on slow loading with the visualization.  If you have troubles, click here to be taken right to the visualization .  It should open in a new tab and you can follow along from there.    This is always a popular post with high school counselors, IECs, parents, and students who are looking for general information on degrees awarded, or a very specific combination of academic programs, location, and other institutional characteristics. It uses IPEDS data I downloaded as soon as I can when it became available (and before a looming government shutdown), and shows all 1,700 majors recognized by the federal government in the IPEDS system, using CIP codes, and the number of degrees awarded by college in any selected area. For instance, you might have a question about which college awards the most degrees in French Language and Literature: A few clicks, and you find it's the University of Arizona.  If you want a colder climate, choose the Great Lakes region,

Freshman Migration, 1986 to 2020

(Note: I discovered that in IPEDS, Penn State Main Campus now reports with "The Pennsylvania State University" as one system.  So when you'd look at things over time, Penn State would have data until 2018, and then The Penn....etc would show up in 2020.  I found out Penn State main campus still reports its own data on the website, so I went there, and edited the IPEDS data by hand.  So if you noticed that error, it should be corrected now, but I'm not sure what I'll do in years going forward.) Freshman migration to and from the states is always a favorite visualization of mine, both because I find it a compelling and interesting topic, and because I had a few breakthroughs with calculated variables the first time I tried to do it. If you're a loyal reader, you know what this shows: The number of freshman and their movement between the states.  And if you're a loyal viewer and you use this for your work in your business, please consider supporting the costs