2017 Admissions Data: First Look

IPEDS just released Fall, 2017 Admissions data, and I downloaded it and took a quick look at it. If you've been here before, most of this should be self-explanatory.

Three tabs, here: The first is to take a look at a single institution. Use the control at top to select the college or university you're looking for. (Hint, type a few letters of the name to make scrolling quicker).

The second tab allows you to compare ten (you can do more, but it gets messy). I started with the ten most people want to see, but you can delete them by scrolling to their check in the drop down and deleting them, and clicking apply. Add institutions by checking the box by their name.

The final shows the relationships between test scores and Pell, which I've done before, but I never get tired of. Choose SAT or ACT calculated means for the x-axis, then limit by region and/or control if you so desire.

Notes:

1) Some of the admissions data for 2017 is tentative, so anomalies are probably in error.
2) Test-optional colleges are not allowed to report test data
3) Financial aid data is for 2016, as the 2017 data is not yet available. It tends not to change dramatically from one year to the next, however.

Comments

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...

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...

Higher Ed Data Stories

Search This Blog