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.

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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

Doctoral recipients by bachelor's degree-granting institution, 2016-2020

Each time I publish this visualization I get a lot of traffic on the site, and I can see why. It shows all doctoral recipients (in 2016-2020) broken out by where they received their bachelor's degrees. So, for instance, the top level view shows that UC Berkeley is the alma mater of more doctoral recipients than any other institution, followed by The University of Michigan and Cornell University. That would be interesting, but of course, these are large institutions, and it's natural to think lots of graduates will lead to lots of doctoral degrees. No surprise there. So the visualization allows you to look at the types of colleges you or your students might want: Select a state, select public or private, select by Carnegie type if you wish. You can also look at HBCUs if you'd like. Most important, you can filter by doctoral degree, so if you want to see which institution sends the most students to doctorates in chemistry, you can do so. To head off the questions I get ev

Higher Ed Data Stories

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