Skip to main content

Pell and Non-Pell Graduation Rates

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 (light blue) and Non-Pell (dark blue) on the left; the percentage in the measured freshman cohort in purple in the center; and the gap, in percentage points.    The identical chart at the bottom breaks it out by sector.

I recommend you use the filters at the top to limit the top chart by a)  the size of the cohort (for instance, between 500 and 5,000), and then by sector.  For these two filters, the bottom chart will not change.  However, if you want to look at a specific state, using that filter will affect both the top and bottom.

If you want to sort the data by either the red or purple bars, hover over the top of the column, and click on the small icon that appears.  Sort descending, ascending, or alphabetical on consecutive clicks.

On the second chart is a mostly a nothing burger: I was curious to see if the percentage of Pell students  in the cohort had an effect on the gap.  As you can see, it doesn't.  On this chart, type and select any institution to see it highlighted.

And, as always, let me know what you see.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...