Endowment Data from 847 Colleges and Universities

The 2014 NACUBO report on college and university endowments is hot off the presses. Unfortunately, it's in a table in a pdf on the organization's website. So, after considerable frustration to get the data into useable format, it's now visualized here for you.

Note that there are three different views, and you can change them by clicking the tabs across the top:

Endowment Value Dashboard is a heat map, which is sort of like a pie chart, except it's like a sheet cake cut into pieces the size of the listed university endowment. The 847 institutions in the study collectively hold about $455B in endowment funds. You can see the pieces of the cake: Harvard's for instance, is about $32B, or 7% of all the endowments of all the colleges and universities in the country. The pieces are colored by the percentage gain in one year. For instance, Stanford gained $1.6B between 2012 and 2013, but the 10% increase only ranked it 483rd. When you have a lot, you don't need a big increase to grow a lot.
The Endowment Change Dashboard shows four variables: The rank of the percentage change along the x-axis and the rank of the value gained along the y-axis; the color shows the raw amount of the one-year change; and the size shows the relative value of the endowment at the end of 2013.
The Value and Change Dashboard shows the 2013 value in the gray bar; the amount of change on the red, both on the top chart; and then the values and changes arrayed on the bottom. Each of the two dot charts is colored by the rank of the other variable.

Confused? Good. This is really intended to show a couple of things:

The (some might say) ridiculous range of endowment at institutions of higher learning in the US and Canada. Note that even with relatively modest growth at the wealthiest institutions, six of them increased endowment by more than $1B in a year. Only 83 institutions even have an endowment of $1B or more.
The absolute futility of trying to catch up, unless you're already in striking distance.
Never put your data in a table if you want it to be interesting

There's a lot of stuff here. And way more that could be done. What do you see?

Learn About Tableau

Comments

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

Yes, your yield rate is still falling, redux (2021)

I've been creating this data visualization, or some form of it, for several years now . I think it's most useful for higher education enrollment professionals who have to explain to people at their university why their yield rate is falling. The short answer is that applications and admits are increasing faster than student populations: If a student today applies to an average of seven colleges, compared to four colleges twenty years ago, yield rate almost has to go down. I'm sure AI will fix this, and all our problems, very soon. But I've spoken to others who use this other ways: To work with students to talk about chances for admission; to show parents how things have changed in the past twenty years; or to help journalists understand the lay of the land. Whatever you use this for, I hope it's instructive, and I hope you feel free to share it widely. And if you work in a college or university and save yourself some time by using this, or if you work with clien

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

Higher Ed Data Stories

Search This Blog