Higher Ed Data Stories

This is always a popular post: Statistics on the entering class of 2014 at about 1900 colleges and universities across the country.  It's based on IPEDS data, which I downloaded from the IPEDS data center and conditioned.  The source file is here , if you'd like to do something with it yourself. This year, NCES only reports test score ranges for those colleges and universities that require tests for all applicants; in some regard, this makes sense, but it's unfortunate.  At my institution, for instance, about 94% of enrolling students submit tests, and this data might be helpful to students who do plan to apply with tests.  I plan to let NCES know this was not a good idea, and you can, too, if you'd like.  For now you'll know why these colleges don't show up .  You'll have to check with the colleges themselves. This view starts with private, Liberal Arts Colleges in the Great Lakes region, but you can make the list be whatever you want using the filters

It's happened three times in the last several months: I am invited into, or stumble into, a discussion on "Frontloading."  It's been the case that the people who are talking about it are generally convinced it exists, and generally believe it's a widely practiced approach. In case you don't know, frontloading is the presumed practice of enrollment managers (of course) who make big institutional aid awards to entice freshmen to enroll, and then remove them after the freshman year.  Journalists, especially, point to aggregated data suggesting that the average amount of institutional aid for non-freshmen is lower than for freshmen. "Aha!" they scream, "The smoking gun!" Well, not so fast.  I'm willing to admit that there may be a few colleges in the US where frontloading happens, probably in a clandestine manner, but perhaps, in at least one instance I was made aware of, for a very logical and justifiable reason.  But most enrollment m

I've had a long-standing rule when publishing to this blog: I don't take requests.  This is for two reasons: First, I do this for fun, and I publish what's interesting to me, hoping you'll find it compelling as well.  Second, the tools available now allow you to answer your own questions fairly easily.  If you like my visualizations but want to ask some more questions, you can download free versions of Tableau Public and explore to your heart's content. But yesterday, when I published this piece on freshman migration, a topic that generated a lot of interest this time and the first time I did it, I admitted this was the most fun I had exploring data.  And I also admitted that I had dozens of views lined up, but, in the interest of keeping things simple, kept just two. Since it's gone live, I've had about 20 people ask me "Could you look at this data this way?" questions.  That's exciting, because I'm always hoping what I publish genera

Note: Please be sure to hover over a bar on the first chart, below, to see how to interact. When I was a kid, I was fascinated by license plates on cars.  And whenever I found myself in a college parking lot, it was like a buffet, with lots of plates from distant states. Thus, my fascination with freshman migration and out-of-state enrollment was born. IPEDS has finally released 2014 Fall enrollment data, and that means the bi-annual availability of the freshman migration data.  I like visualizing this for two reasons: First, I can think of dozens of ways to show it, all of them interesting to me, and maybe to you, too.  Second, the data is so multi-faceted that it requires viewers to interact, something I've preached about for years: Don't let me decide which data is interesting; decide for yourself how you want to view it. There are two ways I've presented it here.  On the first, you start by looking at the states that exported the most freshmen in 2014.  If you wan