Higher Ed Data Stories

Strategic planning at universities is always an important process, but it's even more crucial to do correctly these days.  And lots of institutions might be missing a really critical element in scanning the external environment: The extent to which federal financial aid programs contribute to the essential revenue streams that run the enterprise. This is a fairly simple, if crowded, visualization, showing about 900 private colleges and universities who have good data in IPEDS.  Each dot is a bubble, colored by region, representing a single institution.  Its position along the horizontal axis shows student loans as percentage of core revenues, from left (low) to right (high).  I've included subsidized undergraduate direct loans, unsubsidized undergraduate direct loans, Parent PLUS loans, graduate subsidized, and Graduate PLUS loans in the calculation.  I did not include private loans. Some of these numbers may seem high, but understand what this says and what...

"You should write something about discount rates." I hear that a lot these days.  Even though NACUBO does its annual discount study , people still want and crave more.  There is no topic, it seems, as much on the minds of people in universities as discount rate. But despite my desire to make you, the loyal readers of this blog, happy, there are a lot of reasons I haven't written about discount rates: First, data are old.  It's a long story, but financial reporting (where you learn about financial aid) is reported about a year after the freshman class enrolls.  So the ability to calculate discount is always behind the most current admissions data.  The viz below is for 2014 freshmen for instance, and it's the most recent publicly available.  It's hard to describe to people how much things have changed between 2014 and 2017. (And even harder to figure out why 2016 admissions data are not out yet.) Second, discount is not as important as accounta...