Skip to main content

Changes in Bachelor's Degrees, 2011-2017

This will probably be the final post in Higher Ed Data Stories for a while.  As you may already know, I'm leaving DePaul for the "best coast" to take the position of Vice Provost of Enrollment at Oregon State University, effective July 1.  Thus, I'll be in personal and professional transition for a while, and once I arrive, I'll be busy learning a new institution and working on new challenges that should keep me occupied for a while. (Additionally, I'm not sure what my Tableau situation will be like...)

As you may already know, HEDS got its start when I decided to revise and share work I was already doing in my job at DePaul. Much of it, I presumed, would be of interest to university colleagues and high school and independent counselors.  But I had no idea how many people craved information like this.

So, for now, here is information about bachelor's degrees earned in 2011, 2014, and 2017, the most recent available in the IPEDS data center.  It's presented three different ways so you can find the information you're curious about.

First Tab: Macro Trends shows bachelor's degrees awarded by US four-year, public and private, not-for-profit institutions in three years (2011, 2014, and 2017).  Use the highlight control at top to call out a specific area, and use the filters to limit the universe, for instance, to look at just private colleges in New England, or Doctoral Institutions in the Southeast.  This will give you an overall perspective on the market, which is much bigger, much more powerful, and far more independent than we'd like to admit. Hover over data points for details via the popup.

Second Tab: Single Institution allows you to select a single college or university to compare over time.  You generally won't see a lot of change over any three-year period, but the overall upward trends are interesting.  The slices are labeled by total number and percent of total for ease of comparison. 

Third Tab: Changes in Bachelor's Degrees breaks out the data by discipline.  It starts with Education majors, but you can use the control to change it to any academic area.  Again, if you don't want to see the whole universe of institutions, use the filters to change the included universities. 

One note about this: Some institutions have meteoric increases due to small base numbers in 2011.  For instance, going from 2 to 16 is a 700% increase, which is interesting but not compelling.  To make the data more meaningful, I set the filter (at lower right) to include only those institutions with at least 50 degrees awarded in the discipline in 2011.  You might want to change this, to 15 for Philosophy, for instance, or 100 for Engineering.  As always, you can't break this; just use the reset icon at lower right.

And as always, let me know what you see that's interesting. 


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

The College Finder

Note: A few people have commented on slow loading with the visualization.  If you have troubles, click here to be taken right to the visualization .  It should open in a new tab and you can follow along from there.    This is always a popular post with high school counselors, IECs, parents, and students who are looking for general information on degrees awarded, or a very specific combination of academic programs, location, and other institutional characteristics. It uses IPEDS data I downloaded as soon as I can when it became available (and before a looming government shutdown), and shows all 1,700 majors recognized by the federal government in the IPEDS system, using CIP codes, and the number of degrees awarded by college in any selected area. For instance, you might have a question about which college awards the most degrees in French Language and Literature: A few clicks, and you find it's the University of Arizona.  If you want a colder climate, choose the Great Lakes region,

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