Welcome to the Hen House, Mr. Fox

Jerry Falwell, Jr., President of Liberty University, has just indicated that he will head a new task force to examine the Department of Education's policies on colleges and universities: Things like, "overreaching regulation” and micromanagement by the department in areas like accreditation and policies that affect colleges’ student-recruiting behavior, like the new “borrower defense to repayment” regulations," according to this report in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required, but if you're in higher ed and you're not subscribing, you should. I've not been paid to endorse the Chronicle. Or anything, for that matter.)

Thousands of people on Twitter and in other social media have already pointed out why this is a bad idea, especially coming on what appears to be the approval of Besty De Vos as Secretary of Education. But if you want to see how far Liberty has taken recruitment, even under the current regulations that attempt to make admissions and recruiting more ethical, I challenge you to fill out the inquiry form on their website. Then count to ten, and I'm guessing you'll soon be connected to one of their friendly, helpful, sales agents who will tell you how you, too, can become a champion for Christ, and how you can use federal dollars to do so.

Here is how much federal aid Liberty students (and those from every other university receiving your tax dollars) received in 2015-16 (a few of the programs are 2014-2015, but they don't change much.) Interact to your heart's content.

And feel free to share this with your elected officials.

Comments

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...

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...

Changes in Educational Attainment, 1940 to 2018

Note: A few people have pointed out that some data on this appears to be slightly askew, even though the story is mostly unchanged. So don't cite it. Don't look at the viz yet. Wait until I tell you. This is an update to a post I did about five years ago , showing the growth in educational attainment in the US over time. I thought then, and I still think, it's among the most jaw-dropping visualizations I've done, not, of course, for the visualization skills, but for the story it tells, and perhaps, the future it holds for us. This is from Table A-1 on this page of the Census Bureau. First, before you dive into it, take a guess about the percentage of adults in the US, aged 35-54 with a bachelor's degree or higher. Got a guess? If you have a college degree, you probably said something like fifty or sixty percent, based on my sampling of twenty people or so. If you didn't, your guess is probably much lower, usually ten or fifteen percent. T...

Higher Ed Data Stories

Search This Blog