Skip to main content

Student Loans in Detail

Note: Functionality restored.

A few posts back, I wrote about Enrollment by Institutional Type.  I've also taken a stab at Student Loans before, but find the federal data very hard to work with, as the types of loans rolled up into different categories is not consistent over time, thus leading to just flat-out-wrong conclusions about what's happening over time (note: In case it's not clear, that link leads to a visualization that proves how important it is to know your data; I didn't think those numbers could be right, and it turns out they weren't, but it was only apparent when I took a look at graduate loans, which were rolled up with undergraduate loans one year, but not the other.)

Anyway, it's interesting to take a look at the world of federal student loans: Who gets them, the balance between and among the different programs, and how different institutions benefit from them.

This visualization shows both macro- and micro- student loan data.  On the top two charts, you can see the whole universe: Each circle represents an institution, sized by the total volume of loans selected.  On the left, they're colored by School Type; on the right, by Loan Type.  At the bottom, you'll find a bar chart, showing the volume by school, and the bars are colored by institutional type.

Use the filters in the middle to limit your selection, to see only the type(s) of schools or the type(s) of loans you're interested in, or to view institutions from a state or group of states.  All three views update.

What you'll see here is interesting, to say the least.  The first thing to jump out at you is The University of Phoenix, but with about 400,000 students, that's to be expected.  Even if you control for size, you'll see Phoenix has a high percentage of its budget generated from student loans, and although it's easy to compare them to Princeton, for instance, on a per capita basis, you also have to remember that Phoenix enrolls a lot more low-income students (in both number and percentage) than their distant cousin in New Jersey.

What do you see?  What would you like to see?



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...

Educational Attainment and the Presidential Elections

I've been fascinated for a while by the connection between political leanings and education: The correlation is so strong that I once suggested that perhaps Republicans were so anti-education because, in general, places with a higher percentage of bachelor's degree recipients were more likely to vote for Democrats. The 2024 presidential election puzzled a lot of us in higher education, and perhaps these charts will show you why: We work and probably hang around mostly people with college degrees (or higher).  Our perception is limited. With the 2024 election data just out , I thought I'd take a look at the last three elections and see if the pattern I noticed in 2016 and 2020 held.  Spoiler: It did, mostly. Before you dive into this, a couple of tips: Alaska's data is always reported in a funky way, so just ignore it here.  It's a small state (in population, that is) and it's very red.  It doesn't change the overall trends even if I could figure out how to c...

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...