Skip to main content

Tuition at State Flagships

The College Board publishes good and interesting data about college tuition, including a great table of tuition at state flagship universities. (I realized while writing this that I don't know how a university is designated a state flagship.  Maybe someone knows.)

There is some interesting stuff here, but I'll leave it for you to decide what jumps out at you: If you live in North Dakota, you might wonder why South Dakota has such low tuition for non-residents.  If you live just outside Virginia or Michigan, you might wonder why it costs so much to cross the border.

Anyway, using the tabs across the top, there are five views here:

Maps

Four maps, showing (clockwise from upper left) in-state tuition, out-of-state tuition, non-resident premium index (that is, how much extra a non-resident pays, normalized to that state's in-state tuition), and the non-resident premium in dollars.  Hover over a state for details.  You can change the year, and see the values in 2017 inflation-adjusted dollars, or nominal (non-adjusted) dollars.

States in Context

This arrays the states by tuition over time.  Use the highlight functions (go ahead, type in the box; you won't break anything) to focus on a region or a specific state. You can view resident or non-resident tuition, adjusted or non-adjusted.

Single Institution

Just what it says.  The view starts with The University of Michigan, but you can change it to any state flagship using the control at top right. Percentage increase is best viewed in 2017 adjusted dollars, of course.

Percentage Change

Shows change of in-state tuition by institution over time.  The ending value is calculated as a percentage change between the first and last years selected, so use the controls to limit the years.  Again, highlight functions put your institution in context

Non-resident Premium 

This shows how much extra non-residents pay, and trends over time.  Again, highlighter is your best friend.

Feel free to share this, of course, especially with people who are running for office in your state.

And, as always, let me know what you think.






Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...

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...

Education Levels in the US, by State and Attainment

Attainment has always been an interesting topic for me, every since I first got stunned into disbelief when I looked at the data over time.  Even looking at shorter periods can lead to some revelations that many don't make sense at first. Here is the latest data from NCES, published in the Digest of Education Statistics . Please note that this is for informational purposes only, and I've not even attempted to visualize the standard errors in this data, which vary from state-to-state.  There are four views year, all looking at educational attainment by state in 2012 and 2022.   The first shows data on a map: Choose the year, and choose the level of attainment.  Note that the top three categories can be confusing: BA means a Bachelor's degree only; Grad degree means at least a Master's (or higher, of course); and BA or more presumably combines those two.  Again, standard errors might mean the numbers don't always add up perfectly. The second shows the data o...