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Showing posts from July, 2021

Flagships, Land Grants, and Big Public Universities

This is my annual (sort of) look at tuition at public universities across America.  Even when I worked at private universities, this was a topic of interest to me, and it should be for you too. Public universities educate the vast majority of students in the US (and when you add in community colleges, the skew toward publics becomes even more pronounced.)  There are real consequences to an educated population, as I've written about here and here and many other places. There is no definition of "Flagship University" but we can look at Land Grant institutions, of which there are three categories: The institutions chartered as a result of the 1862 Morrill Act; the 1890 institutions, of which many are HBCUs; and the 1990 institutions, which include many Tribal Colleges and community colleges. For this, I've chosen the 1862 land grants, the flagships (see below) and the other large public universities, with enrollments over 20,000 undergraduates in order to get the great

Higher Education Enrollment and Capacity

This week, I was tagged in a tweet by Akil Bello , asking about capacity in higher education in the US.  My first response was that there was no way to measure capacity; no one asks this in federal reporting, and any way to attempt to measure it was fraught with problems. Remember this point as I attempt to do just that. At the same time, I've been hearing more about the decreases in college enrollment nationwide, and I've wanted to respond to them and supply some context.  So, I think I might be able to accomplish both with one post and one visualization. On the latter point, you want to take a look at the first tab (across the top) Total Enrollment Trends . You can see that we have experienced some drop-off in total enrollment (gray line for totals and colored lines by segments). Hover over the lines to see how much they've changed from 1980 and from the prior year.  Measured against the dramatic increase over a longer period of time, the drop-off might be viewed as a bli