Skip to main content

Undergraduate enrollments by ethnicity, 2015

I was doing some research for our own internal discussions, and decided to take it a few more steps to look at enrollment of undergraduate students by ethnicity at about 2,000 four-year, public and private institutions in the US.  (And when you look at the data and wonder why, rest assured, I checked: Miami Dade does offer Bachelor's degrees via online programs.)

It's here, and the first two views are pretty easy to navigate:  Each chart shows a separate ethnicity and lists each institution in descending order.  The first view is by counts, and the second by percentages.  Thus you can see the institution that enrolls either the most Hispanic students, for instance, or the institution with the greatest percentage of Hispanic students, depending on your preference.

If you'd like to focus on a single state, just public or private, or colleges of a certain size range, use the filters at the top.  You can always reset the views using the control at the bottom.

The third view allows more customization.  Each point represents an institution, arrayed on the x- and y-axis.  But you can control what values the axes show: For instance, percentage White on the x-axis, and percentage Asian/Pacific Islander on the y-axis.  The points are colored by control: Orange is for private institutions, purple for public. Again, you can limit by undergraduate enrollment or by state, if you'd like.  But this view has the advantage of choosing a highlight institution: Use the highlight box to put a university of interest in context.  Type part of the name, and select it, and it will show up all by itself.

I hope this is helpful for use with students who are interested in thinking about and comparing colleges and universities by enrollment profile.  And if you're interested in seeing how an ecologist might look at enrollment diversity, check out this piece I wrote for Academic Impressions last fall.


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...

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...

Changes in SAT Scores after Test-optional

One of the intended consequences of test-optional admission policies at some institutions prior to the COVID-19 pandemic was to raise test scores reported to US News and World Report.  It's rare that you would see a proponent of test-optional admission like me admit that, but to deny it would be foolish. Because I worked at DePaul, which was an early adopter of the approach (at least among large universities), I fielded a lot of calls from colleagues who were considering it, some of whom were explicit in their reasons for doing so.  One person I spoke to came right out at the start of the call: She was only calling, she said, because her provost wanted to know how much they could raise scores if they went test-optional. If I sensed or heard that motivation, I advised people against it.  In those days, the vast majority of students took standardized admission tests like the SAT or ACT, but the percentage of students applying without tests was still relatively small; the ne...