Yes, Enrollment is Going Down. Also up.

When designing a data visualization, the first thing to ask is, "What does the viewer want to see, or need to know?" If you're designing a dashboard for a CFO or a CEO or a VP for Marketing, those things are pretty straight forward: You're designing for one person and you have a pretty good idea what that person wants.

But in higher education, we want to look at segments of the industry, and trends that are specific to our sector. And there are thousands of you (if this blog post is average, that is). So I can't know.

This visualization of enrollment data measures only one thing: Enrollment. But it measures several different types of enrollment (full-time, part-time, graduate, and undergraduate, in combination) at many different types of institutions (doctoral, baccalaureate, public, private, etc.) And the best thing is that you can make it yours with a few clicks.

The top chart shows total headcount, and the bottom shows percentage change since the first year selected. If you want to change the years, or change the types of enrollment, or the universe of the colleges selected, use the gray boxes at the right. At any time, use the lavender box at top right to change the breakouts of the charts: To color by region, or grad/undergrad, or any other variable listed.

There are lots of interesting trends here, some of which will help you realize that while enrollment may be declining, it's not declining everywhere, or for every type of institution.

See something interesting? Post in the comments below.

Comments

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...

Changes in Educational Attainment, 1940 to 2018

Note: A few people have pointed out that some data on this appears to be slightly askew, even though the story is mostly unchanged. So don't cite it. Don't look at the viz yet. Wait until I tell you. This is an update to a post I did about five years ago , showing the growth in educational attainment in the US over time. I thought then, and I still think, it's among the most jaw-dropping visualizations I've done, not, of course, for the visualization skills, but for the story it tells, and perhaps, the future it holds for us. This is from Table A-1 on this page of the Census Bureau. First, before you dive into it, take a guess about the percentage of adults in the US, aged 35-54 with a bachelor's degree or higher. Got a guess? If you have a college degree, you probably said something like fifty or sixty percent, based on my sampling of twenty people or so. If you didn't, your guess is probably much lower, usually ten or fifteen percent. T...

Higher Ed Data Stories

Search This Blog