Skip to main content

Tuition Transparency Ratings

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 the same way on this one.

There are a couple of problems here: One is the data.  I could not find a single program on the New England Culinary Institute website that listed a tuition of $88,000, but that's the data shown here. There are several instances like that in this data; even if they are technically accurate because of the way a program is configured, it doesn't advance our understanding of the issue much.

But more important, net cost is a function of who enrolls and how much aid you can give: If you suddenly stopped enrolling middle-income students, or you have small enrollments, the results can be very volatile. Net cost is a remnant, not a target that can be tightly controlled.  And, it seems in many instances net cost is being calculated by different people in different ways over the two-year period.

Still, there is some good stuff here, I think.  Take a look and let me know.




Comments

Post a Comment

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more