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

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...

First-year student (freshman) migration, 2022

A new approach to freshman migration, which is always a popular post on Higher Ed Data Stories. If you're a regular reader, you can go right to the visualization and start interacting with it.  And I can't stress enough: You need to use the controls and click away to get the most from these visualizations. If you're new, this post focuses on one of the most interesting data elements in IPEDS: The geographic origins of first-year (freshman) students over time.  My data set includes institutions in the 50 states and DC.  It includes four-year public and four-year, private not-for-profits that participate in Title IV programs; and it includes traditional institutions using the Carnegie classification (Doctoral, Masters, Baccalaureate, and Special Focus Schools in business, engineering, and art/design. Data from other institutions is noisy and often unreliable, or (in the case of colleges in Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and other territories, often shows close to 100% of enro...

Diversity in the First-year Class at the Ivy Plus Institutions

 I'm not sure where to begin on this one, so let's veer off topic a bit.   I've decided I'll likely be phasing out Higher Ed Data Stories in the near future as I go into retirement and start  my new venture , which is soft launched but not officially open for business.  When I do, I'll be posting regularly on  my blog over there , but won't be putting everything out on the web for free, as I've been doing on this site.  I do appreciate the contributions people made on the Buy Me Coffee site, but the hosting, software, and labor costs never balanced with the revenue, and while there was a lot of good will that came from my work, I was still in a deficit situation (especially on the time part) and I'll need to dedicate that to the business side of things.  Medicare Parts B and D ain't free, you know. But this is some unfinished business, and it might be a good place to end.  You know I've been personally opposed to the very idea of the SAT and ...