Skip to main content

A Deep Look at Net Price

First things first: Let's define what IPEDS calls Net Price: You can read all the details here, or just realize it's the cost that students and parents are expected to pay after all grant aid is awarded.  The average is only calculated for those who receive aid.  If you have questions beyond what is found on the link above, you'll have to ask someone else to explain it.

Some limitations: This data is for Fall, 2018, and it's by income bands that have been around a long time: Under $30,000, and then in increments up to anyone over $110,000.  That top threshold is clearly too low, with some college budgets exceeding $70,000 annually.

There are four views here that go from very high-level overviews to more granular, and ends with 45 private, selective colleges who have a unique quirk in their pricing, or so it might seem.

View 1: All Values Arrayed shows the entire landscape in a box and whiskers plot.  The gray boxes show were the middle 50% of the (unweighted) distribution is.  It would be fun to weight by enrollment, but I'm not that good at coding this stuff.  Choose the income range, and if you want, filter to a region.

View 2: All Colleges displays the five different net prices for each college on one horizontal bar.  Hover for details.  Make the population of colleges you're looking at smaller by filtering Pell Grant percentages, Carnegie type, switching from private to public, choosing a region, or filtering by institutional wealth, if you'd like.

View 3: Net Price and Endowments shows the relationship between the two.  Use the filters as you wish to make the display more legible, and use the parameter at the bottom to change what family income band you're looking at, and note a couple of things: Public universities (default view) are all funded differently, and endowment per FTE can be very misleading, based on external foundations who hold some or all of the endowment funds.  Also, notice the labels on the x-axis when you switch from public to private institutions.

View 4: Discrepant Net Prices.  This is an interesting one, and I found it by accident.  There are about 45 private, selective colleges who have lower net prices for families with incomes between $30,000 and $48,000 than they do for families with incomes under $30,000.  To the uneducated or unsophisticated viewer, this looks nefarious.  I don't think it is, for reasons I outlined in this Twitter thread.

What do you find?  Do these numbers make sense?  Let me know, as always.



Comments

Post a Comment

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more