Skip to main content

Pricing Public Education in the States

Everyone is--or perhaps should be--interested in how the state you live in thinks about public higher education pricing.  Even if you don't have a student in your family enrolled in a state institution, you probably pay taxes to support higher education; even if you don't pay taxes, you're probably interested in how your state develops educated citizenry who someday will.

So it's very interesting to look at this data from the Digest of Education Statistics several different ways.  In order to get the most out of this visualization, you must interact, however, and there are only two ways to do so.  Both are very easy.

First, use this control in the middle of the page:


I promise you, you won't break anything.  With this control, you decide what value to show on the bars and to use to color the map (orange is low; purple is high).  It starts off with 2012 Resident Tuition and Fees for Public, four-year universities.  But choose anything: Non-resident tuition, for instance; Resident tuition at two-year colleges; average private tuition in the state; the non-resident premium (that is, how much more does a non-resident pay); the non-resident premium percent (how many times base tuition is the "up-charge" for non-residents; the 2-to-4 year premium (the difference between average two year publics and four-year publics in the state for residents): the 2-to-4 year premium percent (that value again, expressed as an up-charge to move up from a community college to a state university); the in-state private premium (if a student stays in state, how much more does he or she pay for a private university, on average); or out-of-state premium, for students who want to leave the home state but would consider either a public or private university in that destination state.)

Second, you can limit the view to just certain regions, which makes the New England states, for instance, easier to see.  Use this control


to make those selections to your heart's content.  Both controls work on the map and the bar chart underneath it.  The bottom has a scroll bar on it, and if you show the entire US, you can see the US Average, in blue.

This is at once astonishingly simple and very rich in details.

Some caveats: These are averages, so Michigan does not show Michigan State or the University of Michigan tuition: It shows the average of publics in Michigan.  Things are a little less clear when you compare average publics to average privates, of course, but it's still interesting. Second, these data show sticker price, not the net price.  Even flagship public universities are heavily discounting non-resident tuition, so your results, as they say, may vary.

Start interacting.




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...

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...