Skip to main content

How will demographics change enrollment?

Ever since I started in admissions, people have been talking about demographics changes and challenges, and the chant continues.  The future, we're told, will look very different than the present.

Our trade paper, the Chronicle of Higher Education, ran an article about how this might affect higher education.  It included lots of interesting charts and graphs, but didn't allow me to look at the data in the ways I wanted to.  So I downloaded it and started looking at it using Tableau.

This is as much a testament to self-service BI as it is to the trends in the data.  I've often spoken about the 80/80 rule of business intelligence: 80% of what an analyst gives you, you don't need; 80% of what you want isn't in the report.  I spent a long time playing with and slicing this data to see if I could find a way to present it that makes sense, and that gives people what they want.  And every time I answered a question, I generated several more ("what if" can waste a lot of time.")

In the end, after several different views, I settled on the first one, below.  It's very simple, yet it gives you the flexibility find out most of what you need.

On the chance that you want or need something else, though, I kept the other views I had been experimenting with.

View 2: Maps and Details allows you to see the data mapped; once you filter to a region, you can see how states compare.

View 3: Changes with a State over Time looks at the same data four ways: Numbers, percent change, percent of total, and numeric change by ethnicity.

View 4: Counties Mapped allows you to select a state and see where concentrations of ethnicities live; choose a state, choose the ethnic group and age of the population, and see the results.

View 5: States and Counties shows ethnic percentages for every county, listed by state.

View 6: Counties shows all counties regardless of state.  Did you know there are 40 counties in the US where every 18-year old is white? Or that one county in South Dakota is 98% Native American?

Some notes about the data are on the CHE website.  Be sure to read them so you know what this shows and doesn't show.

Again, remember to interact.  You can't break anything.

And if the frame is not displaying the visualization correctly, you can go right to the original on the Tableau Public website.





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&

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