Higher Ed Data Stories

While waiting for 2014 IPEDS data to come out, I've been searching the web for more good educational data to visualize, and came across this site , where I found a nice little data set .  It's from 2010, and tracks 9th graders through high school and college. We typically think of looking at high school graduates and measuring how well they do, which is important, of course.  But you can have a high percentage of graduates enrolling in or graduating from college masking a problem of high school dropouts.  This data helps look at that. For all the data here, assume you start with 100 students in 9th grade in the state: What percentage of them graduate from high school? What percentage of them enter college? What percentage make it to the sophomore year of college? What percentage graduate from college within 150% of normal time (in other words, within six years)? Finally, there is another, more traditional measure included: The percentage of high school graduates w

Many people in higher education are fascinated with prestige, whether we like to admit it or not.  The question, "Where did you go to college?" can carry a lot of weight in job interviews or even casual conversation as people get acquainted. The National Science Foundation annually publishes data telling us the colleges that produce the most alumni who go on to earn a doctorate from a US institution in a given year.  It's not a great data set in itself, and some brave soul will take IPEDS degree data and merge it to show which of these institutions are the most efficient producer by discipline, but that's not what you'll find here. On this visualization, any time you see a college listed (UCLA, for instance), it shows how many bachelor's graduates of that institution earned a doctorate in 2012.  It's not the university that awarded the doctorate; that could be anywhere in the US (The University of Texas, or Stanford, for instance.) There is some inte

The Federal Government released its Tuition Transparency Ratings today, to help students and parents find out how fast colleges are raising tuition and net price.  And as is the case with many well-meaning government programs, the data doesn't always tell you the whole story. The top chart on this visualization show tuition and fees at about 6,000 colleges and universities; the light blue bar is 2011, and the orange square is 2013.  To the right is the two-year percentage increase.  If you want to limit your selections or sort the colleges differently, take a look at this image, which I've embellished with some instructions.  Click to view larger. The second chart, at the bottom, shows net price for 2010 and 2011.  Net price is calculated after grant aid, which is only reported at the end of the year, which explains the delay.  It's pretty much the same: 2010 on the aqua bar, 2012 on the red dot, and percent change in the purple circle.  The filters and sorts work