2016 IPEDS Admissions Data

Fresh from IPEDS, just months after the wrap up of the 2017 admissions cycle, comes the 2016 admissions data.

I've done something a little different this year to focus your attention, using five views of data, navigable via the tabs across the top of the visualization:

Admissions data (first tab) is pretty clear. Colleges display admit rates (overall, in red) and then admit rates by gender (men are in blue; women are in orange). If the blue bar extends beyond the orange, you can see that the admit rate for men is higher, and vice versa.

On the right are standardized test scores, showing calculated means. In other words, since no one publishes averages and everyone wants them, I took the mid-point of the 25th and 75th percentiles to approximate the 50th percentile. Note that IPEDS does not allow colleges that are test-optional to report test score information. Also note that I've taken out a lot of colleges with extremely limited or suspect data.

As always, you can play with the filters (if there are any) to limit the colleges displayed, and you can sort columns by hovering until you see this little icon, and then click on it.

You can reset the view by clicking this little icon at lower right.

The four other views show a limited scope of colleges: Selective, wealthy, mostly men, and Land Grant institutions, and plotted them using some variables that should both answer and generate questions.

You be the judge.

Comments

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

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&

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

Higher Ed Data Stories

Search This Blog