Higher Ed Data Stories

Much has been made recently of the attempts by colleges to increase the enrollment of Pell-eligible students.  For those who don't know, the Pell Grant is the federal grant awarded to students with the highest financial need.  In fact, the pressure may be backfiring , in a classic case of Campbell's law . Regardless, given the state of federal reporting requirements (why can't the FISAP be in IPEDS??), this blunt tool is still the best one we have widely available to help take stock of the economic diversity of enrolling students. So this is where we are. This morning, Robert Kelchen sent this tweet about the data he uses to measure grad rate gaps between Pell and Non-Pell recipients.  I asked him for it, and he graciously shared it right away.  I spent 30 minutes to visualize it (for our own internal use, mostly), and made it better for others who might want to take a look. On the first view, four data points are displayed: The college's grad rate for Pell (l

This data has long been of interest to high school counselors, and of course, I decided to update it at the worst possible time: During the recent shutdown of the federal government.  I found the NSF website shuttered. Fortunately, the Polar Vortex gave almost everyone in Chicago a two-day break shorty after the government re-opened, and there was not much to do with the windchill approaching -60 °  F; but the government had re-opened, and the data were available.  So here you go. There are two simple views of doctoral education here: The first is the undergraduate institution of doctoral recipients from 2013 to 2017.  You can use the controls at the top to limit your view to public or private; Carnegie type; State, or HBCU status.  If you want to, you can also focus on a single year or range of years using the sliders. For instance, if you wanted to look at how many graduates of Baccalaureate institutions in California received a doctorate in chemistry in 2014, just play around