Higher Ed Data Stories

Every year, The College Board releases summaries of the prior year's AP program .  While I've visualized these before ( here and here ), I've been unwilling to update the visualizations or do longitudinal analysis, for a couple of reasons:  First, the data are in multiple tables in multiple spreadsheets, and they are so heavily formatted for printing that scraping the data out of them is quite a burden.  Second, of course, is that the scores don't change a lot from one year to the next. That is, until 2020, when COVID completely turned the world of higher education upside down.  I was interested in seeing how much scores changed from prior years.  As you can see, the changes are interesting, if not completely surprising. By the way, if you enjoy Higher Ed Data Stories and use it in your work, you can support the web hosting and other costs associated with producing the content by Buying Me A Coffee, here .  If you're a high school teacher or counselor, just...

Each year, NACUBO comes out with its discount study .  If you're not a member, you get a nice press release and some pdfs.  Even if you are a member, you only get a chance to buy the study. And that's enough for most people.  But not for the readers of Higher Ed Data Stories, I've found. Let's talk about discount for a minute.  Different colleges talk about it differently, and even with this IPEDS data, it's impossible to be precise.  But discount rate essentially calculates how much of a college's tuition revenue is offered to students as institutional financial aid. But there are some nuances to it.  Let's start with an example.  College X enrolls 1,000 students, and it charges tuition of $40,000.  That means gross revenue is $40,000,000.  If that college offers institutional aid of $10,000,000 to students, its discount rate is 10/40 or 25%.  If it offers $20,000,000 its discount is 20/40 or 50%.  Sounds easy. But the assumption i...

This week our trade publication, The Chronicle of Higher Education took a quick look at changes in enrollment between Fall, 2019, and Fall, 2020.  If you don't work in higher ed, you can read a few stories per month for free with a registration.  If you do, there is no reason you shouldn't be a subscriber. Something happened in the spring of 2019 that might have had a big effect on college enrollment.  But we're never, of course, 100% sure just how much effect it had.  But the subject is fascinating, of course, and I found the Chronicle's overview to be less than fulfilling.  That's OK, of course.  A good report will cause you to have more questions, not fewer. So I went off to the IPEDS data center and downloaded data to look for myself.  My methodology is a little different than CHE's (I included all colleges, whereas they excluded some smaller institutions).  While the overall results are similar, the nuances--those things you find between the...