Ten Years of Endowment Data

While the endowment of a private university is not a big investment pot from which universities draw income to spend at their discretion (some portion of every endowment is restricted to certain use), it's a very good proxy for institutional wealth. What's always been interesting is the enormous size of the top five or six institutions, always led by Harvard, in comparison to everyone else. And yet Princeton, which enrolls fewer students, has the largest per-FTE endowment.

This visualization shows two things. On the top chart, it's a tree map, or what I like to call a sheet cake map. Think of all the money in all the endowments as one big bowl of batter baked into a cake, and then, once baked, sliced up into pieces. The size of the piece is that institution's endowment as a part of the whole.

The bottom chart shows ten years of endowments, measured at the start of the fiscal year shown, so you can see the hits in 2008--2009 and the overall growth over time. Of interest There are only three private universities in US who had a total endowment in 2012 equal to the ten-year growth of Harvard's.

If you click on an institution, the line chart at the bottom will filter to just that college over time. If you hover over a line on the bottom chart, it will highlight the instituion on the top so you can see its place in the endowment universe.

What do you see?

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

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

The College Finder

Note: A few people have commented on slow loading with the visualization. If you have troubles, click here to be taken right to the visualization . It should open in a new tab and you can follow along from there. This is always a popular post with high school counselors, IECs, parents, and students who are looking for general information on degrees awarded, or a very specific combination of academic programs, location, and other institutional characteristics. It uses IPEDS data I downloaded as soon as I can when it became available (and before a looming government shutdown), and shows all 1,700 majors recognized by the federal government in the IPEDS system, using CIP codes, and the number of degrees awarded by college in any selected area. For instance, you might have a question about which college awards the most degrees in French Language and Literature: A few clicks, and you find it's the University of Arizona. If you want a colder climate, choose the Great Lakes region,

Higher Ed Data Stories

Search This Blog