Higher Ed Data Stories

There is a story in this data, but you can't see it yet.  You'll have to click your mouse to see it. But let's start with what is there: Total enrollment in degree-granting, public and private not-for-profit colleges and universities in the US from 1995 to 2012.  What you see is mostly stability, if you assume the whole world of higher education is made up of these two sectors only: Some growth in each in the top chart (the population has grown, of course, over that time); a relatively stable distribution of private and public enrollments (where private colleges have always enrolled about 20% of the students); and percentage changes since 1995 that are virtually identical. (Hover over the line at any point to get the details). Now, for the work: In the filter in the right, check the box labeled Private Not-for-profit, to add that population to the mix.  The blue line appears, and you begin to see its effect on the other two sectors: By 2012, the for-profit sector enro...

When freshmen students go to college outside their home state, where do they go? It's a question with lots of answers, and the insight is not always easy to figure out, let alone communicate. But I took a stab at it anyway. There are three views here, using the tabs across the top: If you want to know where students from a particular state enroll out-of-state, you should use the default view: When Freshmen Cross State Lines, Where Do They Go?   Pick any freshman home state (the view shows Michigan to start). You can also limit the colleges displayed by filtering on college region or Carnegie Classification. You can see that 372 freshmen left Michigan to go to The University of Toledo in 2012; 117 went to my institution, DePaul. Note that IPEDS data sometimes has mistakes (choose Arkansas, and you'll see one jump right out at you. ** See note below for an update. ) But overall, this data looks pretty clean. If you want to see which colleges enrolled students from specif...

We go through cycles in college admissions, it seems, and the topic of interest in recent days (at least based on my limited view on things) has to do with gender discrimination in college admissions. Most men readily admit that women are smarter, especially when it comes to high school performance. Others point out that men score higher on standardized tests, which predict far less with regard to college performance than grades do, and probably shouldn't carry as much weight as they do. The focus on the treatment of young men and women in college admission goes back at least as far as this article in the New York Times in 2006.  And the topic has been popping up a lot lately, most recently when Patrick O'Connor sent me this article , and asked for my opinion.  I thought it would be an interesting idea to look at the data.  So I did, using IPEDS data from the Fall of 2012. The story here is interesting: The thing that jumps out at you, or at least might jump out a...

A while ago, I found some interesting NCES data on teacher salaries over time Teacher Salaries ; it quickly became the most popular (currently 34,000 views) and the most contentious piece I'd ever posted, and months later, it's still getting hundreds of hits a week.  I simply found the data interesting, and wasn't making any sort of political statement.   I vowed at that time to never post about teachers again , so of course I'm breaking that rule today. This is from the 2011 Common Core of data, showing all personnel in each state who work in public primary and secondary education.  Click here to see the data table and read all the footnotes, especially if you want to argue. There are many things that can explain this data: States that have mostly urban areas (like California and New York) are likely to have bigger schools and classrooms, and thus fewer teachers per student.  Different states with similar populations may have more district administrators if they...

It's no surprise to readers of this blog how much college costs have risen over time.  It's also no secret what's happened to family income over that same period . How have colleges responded?  By dipping deeper into their own pockets, of course (and if you want to talk about the pain of healing self-inflicted wounds, go right ahead; I won't stop you.) This shows three things for each of about 1,500 private, four-year universities in the US: What percentage of students received institutional aid in 2006 (fat gray bar); what percentage received institutional aid in 2011 (thin red bar); and the delta over time (orange bar on right). You can use the filters to narrow down the list: Choose a region and/or a state.  (Note: Those two filters cascade: That is, if you choose "Great Lakes" you won't be able to select "Alabama" in the state section, for instance.) I've begun by limiting the view to colleges and universities of 2,500 full-time un...

This is an astonishing chart, just released today, April 1, 2014.  Can't get any fresher than that. The "Get a Life Institute" of Cambridge, Massachusetts has just conducted a one-year, longitudinal study of how much people need to get a life.  I've used a top flight data analysis, tool, Excel, to crunch the data and magically break it into age groups. 13,013 people were asked about their friends and work colleagues: Whether they ever talked about their SAT or ACT scores, their age, and how much the respondent thought that person should "Get a Life."  (That's what the Get a Life Foundation does, duh.) I think the results speak for themselves.  I have independently verified this data by speaking to a couple guys at Buffalo Wild Wings.  Statistically sound.