Higher Ed Data Stories

How International is a college?  And how do you measure it?  There are certainly a lot of ways to think about it: Location in an international city like New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, for instance.  The extent to which the curriculum takes into account different perspectives and cultures, for another. And, of course, there is some data, this time from the IIE Open Doors Project.  I did a simple calculation, taking the number of international students enrolled, plus the number of enrolled students studying abroad, and divided the sum of those to come up with an international index of sorts. No, it's not precise, and yes, I know the two groups are not discreet, but this--like all the data on this blog--is designed to throw a little light on a question, not to answer it definitively. You'll find data on all the colleges that participate in the IIE survey, displayed in four columns:  Total enrollment (on the left), International enrollment, Overseas study numbers, and the

It's official: Princeton has broken its streak of not considering transfer students for admission, and has admitted 13 applicants for the Fall, 2018 term of the 1,429 who applied, for an astonishing how-low-can-you-go admit rate of 0.9%.  Of course, we'll have to wait until sometime in the future to see how many--if any--of them actually enroll. I thought it might be interesting to take a look at transfers, so I did just that, using an IPEDS file I had on my desktop.  There are four views here, and they're pretty straightforward: The first tab shows the number of transfers enrolled by institution in Fall, 2016 (left hand column) and the transfer ratio.  The ratio simply indicates how many new transfer students for Fall, 2016 you'd meet if you were to go on that college campus in Fall, 2016 and choose 100 students at random.  A higher number suggests a relatively more transfer friendly institution. You can choose any combination of region, control and broad Carnegie

OK. Maybe the headline is misleading.  A bit. I've written about this before: The interconnectedness of indicators for colleges success.  This is more of the same with fresher data to see if anything has changed. Spoiler alert: Not much. What's new this time is the IPEDS publication of graduation rates for students who receive Pell and those who don't, along with overall graduation rates.  While the data are useful in aggregate to point out the trends, at the institutional level, they are not. First, some points about the data:  I've included here colleges with at least 20 Pell-eligible freshmen in 2015, just to eliminate a lot of noise.  Colleges with small enrollments don't always have the IR staff to deliver the best data to IPEDS, and they make the reports a bit odd.  And even without these institutions, you see some issues. Second, colleges that do not require tests for admission are not allowed to report tests in IPEDS.  Once you check "not requir