Higher Ed Data Stories

(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

This is a companion piece to my last blogpost about enrollment gaps for men and women in US postsecondary education, and it covers another angle of that discussion.  In that post, I talked a little bit about the fact that the trend is a long one, and not a new phenomenon, and casually suggested a few reasons for it (TLDR: Higher education does better when the economy is worse, and there are more opportunities for young men without college degrees in the labor market when the economy heats up.)  It's just a theory, of course, and might be completely wrong. What really caught my eye in the WSJ article was this section: The gender enrollment disparity among nonprofit colleges is widest at private four-year schools, where the proportion of women during the 2020-21 school year grew to an average of 61%, a record high, Clearinghouse data show. Some of the schools extend offers to a higher percentage of male applicants, trying to get a closer balance of men and women. “Is there a thumb o

This weekend an article appeared in the Wall Street Journal about the enrollment of young men in colleges across America.  If you don't have a subscription, James Murphy did a good job of summarizing and critiquing the story in this Twitter thread . If you're not proficient on Twitter, you can read the whole thread unrolled here .  The story cites 2020 enrollment data from the National Clearinghouse, which is fast; I only have data from IPEDS which trails a year, but is much more accurate and granular.  There are two important points to make here: Not having data for 2020 means I can't document or leap to conclusions about what happened in 2020; and even if I did have 2020 data, one year's data point and discussions with a handful of people does not a trend make, so I wouldn't leap to conclusions anyway, even if I did have the data. In fact, the trend has been a long time developing and a long time coming.  That it's continuing is hardly surprising to anyone wh