Skip to main content

Public universities and the public mission

My last post looked at the US population by ethnicity, and how it varied by age group in the states.  I thought it might be interesting for anyone, but especially for those who do university planning or enrollment forecasting, as income and ethnicity factor into college going rates.

It made me wonder about each state and the state of public education: Specifically, how does enrollment at public universities in each state compare to the population of college-aged people (generally speaking) in that state?

So I re-used that data and merged some enrollment data into the mix, and voilà, as they say.

What this shows: On the top chart, you see undergraduate enrollment at four-year and two-year public institutions in the US, broken out by ethnicity.  I've excluded international students and those for whom an ethnicity is not known, both of which are about 3.5% of the total.  This allows for easier comparison against the US population (where there is no category for either.)

On the bottom, you see the same breakouts for the US population aged 18-24 (as of the American Community Survey in 2018).

Customize your views:

The State filter changes both the top and the bottom view.

The Carnegie, Sector, and Institution name filters only change the top view, so you can look at any subset of enrollment.

And the Age filter at the bottom allows you to change the US population groups; it defaults to the 18-24 category.

There are some limitations here, of course.  Many public institutions draw a considerable percentage of their enrollment from beyond their state borders, and I made no attempt to adjust for that.  Removing international students and students with unknown ethnicity from the enrollment data inflates (slightly) all the groups shown.  And of course, data don't explain themselves; state policies and histories of access have a lot to do with the shape of enrollment in public universities.  This is a good place to start, but it's not a statistically-controlled analysis.

The second dashboard breaks out enrollment by broad Carnegie categories.  There is only one filter to allow you to select a single state.

As always, let me know what you see.


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

Educational Attainment and the Presidential Elections

I've been fascinated for a while by the connection between political leanings and education: The correlation is so strong that I once suggested that perhaps Republicans were so anti-education because, in general, places with a higher percentage of bachelor's degree recipients were more likely to vote for Democrats. The 2024 presidential election puzzled a lot of us in higher education, and perhaps these charts will show you why: We work and probably hang around mostly people with college degrees (or higher).  Our perception is limited. With the 2024 election data just out , I thought I'd take a look at the last three elections and see if the pattern I noticed in 2016 and 2020 held.  Spoiler: It did, mostly. Before you dive into this, a couple of tips: Alaska's data is always reported in a funky way, so just ignore it here.  It's a small state (in population, that is) and it's very red.  It doesn't change the overall trends even if I could figure out how to c...
Post a Comment
Read more

Changes in SAT Scores after Test-optional

One of the intended consequences of test-optional admission policies at some institutions prior to the COVID-19 pandemic was to raise test scores reported to US News and World Report.  It's rare that you would see a proponent of test-optional admission like me admit that, but to deny it would be foolish. Because I worked at DePaul, which was an early adopter of the approach (at least among large universities), I fielded a lot of calls from colleagues who were considering it, some of whom were explicit in their reasons for doing so.  One person I spoke to came right out at the start of the call: She was only calling, she said, because her provost wanted to know how much they could raise scores if they went test-optional. If I sensed or heard that motivation, I advised people against it.  In those days, the vast majority of students took standardized admission tests like the SAT or ACT, but the percentage of students applying without tests was still relatively small; the ne...
Post a Comment
Read more