Higher Ed Data Stories

 Let's take a look at undergraduate enrollment by ethnicity.  You'd be surprised how hard it is to keep this to seven views, as the topic is complex and nuanced.  But I did. The topic should be self-explanatory: Who goes to college where?  And there are six views, using the tabs across the top: Single Ethnicity Percents allows you to see which institutions have the largest percentage of students of the selected ethnicity.  The view starts with Hawaiian Natives and Other Pacific Islanders, but you can choose any of nine different groups using the filter on the top right.  If you want to limit the universe of colleges, use the filters down the left-hand side.  Maybe you want to look at Asian students but only at HBCUs, for instance. Single Ethnicity Counts is identical, but it uses counts instead of percentages. Filters work the same way. The next two views are static: Student Ethnicities and Destinations is easy to read once you understand it.  Hover over any segment for an ex

 A few weeks ago, I saw this Twitter thread by James Murph y, and it reminded me of something.  If you don't want to read the thread, it has to do with the seemingly enormous advantage private school students have in the admissions process at the highly rejective colleges ( hat tip to Akil Bello for that term. ) What it reminded me of was the data that College Board publishes annually on AP results . It's good of them to do so, but when data is published in massive spreadsheets, the conspiracy theorist in me starts to wonder if there isn't an attempt to claim transparency while attempting obfuscate the patterns.  Even if you manage to download the data, the tables are formatted for printing, not analysis, and it's sliced and diced in ways that make it impossible to do a lot of the detailed analysis you'd might like. But what we have is what we got.  And what I chose to look at today were the tabs that broke out performance on AP exams by test and ethnicity and scho

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