Higher Ed Data Stories

I bet you've heard about the enrollment crisis in American colleges and universities, and I bet you think that men are avoiding college in droves, even if you work at a college and see lots of men on campus.  And you wonder, "How can this be?" Well, it's not exactly the crisis the media are making it out to be.  Here are some views to help you see that. I downloaded data from IPEDS: Undergraduate and graduate enrollment from 2010 to 2020 (in even years) and visualized it for you, in three views.  The first is simple, showing graduate and undergraduate enrollment at all US post-secondary institutions over time.  You can use the filters to look at a region and/or any combination of ethnicities. The second view is even cleaner: It shows all enrollment, broken out by gender percentages, and you can see the trend over time.  If you're interested in a region or a Carnegie cluster, or any specific ethnicities, and level (either graduate or undergraduate). The third vie...

If you're alive today, you have lived your whole life with college rankings.  Yes, even you.  You may not have knows you were living in the time of college rankings, but indeed, you have been, unless you were born before 1911 (or maybe earlier.)  If you're interested, you can read this Twitter thread from 2020 where I discuss them and include snippets of those 1911 rankings as well as those from 1957, written by Chesley Manly. You can read for yourself, or you can trust me, that in fact the rankings as we know them have been surprisingly consistent over time, and most people would have only minor quibbles with the ratings from 1911.  Perhaps that's because they have always tended to measure the same thing. But what if we did different rankings?  No, not like the Princeton Review where they make an attempt to measure best party school, or best cafeteria food, or worst social life.  Something more quantifiable and concrete, although still, admittedly, a hard...

I started doing this post on a regular basis several years ago, in response (if I recall) to a colleague talking about their Board of Trustees Chair insisting that "all we need to do" to bring enrollment back to its former level is to get the yield rate up.   That's the equivalent of saying all you need to do is straighten your drives and cut ten putts from each round, and you'll be a great golfer.  Moreover, it's based on the assumption that a falling yield rate is based on something you're doing or not doing.  The challenge is much larger, and a lot harder to address.  It's not a switch you flip. So we've got this: A look at applications, admits, and enrolls over the last twenty years, and three key ratios that are based on those numbers: Admit rate, or the percentage of applicants offered admission; yield rate, or the percentage of those offered admission who enroll; and the lesser-known draw rate, which is calculated by dividing the yield rate by t...