Skip to main content

Measuring Internationalism in American Colleges

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 International Engagement Index, which is sort of the chance a randomly selected student will be either international or studied internationally in the last year.

The colleges are sorted by the first column, total enrollment.  You may want to see who has the most international students, or the highest International Index.  It's easy to sort these columns by hovering over the small icon near the axis label, as pictured below and indicated by the yellow arrow.  There is one for each column; give it a try, and if you get stuck, use the reset button.


As always, feel free to leave a comment below.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...

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...

Diversity in the First-year Class at the Ivy Plus Institutions

 I'm not sure where to begin on this one, so let's veer off topic a bit.   I've decided I'll likely be phasing out Higher Ed Data Stories in the near future as I go into retirement and start  my new venture , which is soft launched but not officially open for business.  When I do, I'll be posting regularly on  my blog over there , but won't be putting everything out on the web for free, as I've been doing on this site.  I do appreciate the contributions people made on the Buy Me Coffee site, but the hosting, software, and labor costs never balanced with the revenue, and while there was a lot of good will that came from my work, I was still in a deficit situation (especially on the time part) and I'll need to dedicate that to the business side of things.  Medicare Parts B and D ain't free, you know. But this is some unfinished business, and it might be a good place to end.  You know I've been personally opposed to the very idea of the SAT and ...