Skip to main content

More about men

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 view is a little more complex, but before I go there, I hope you will consider supporting the costs of Higher Ed Data Stories if you use it in your work (high school counselors should always consider this site to be guilt-free).  If you show it to clients, or use it with your BOT, I would appreciate support to pay for software and web hosting fees; I don't monetize this blog via ads that I benefit from.  Click here to show your support and keep Higher Ed Data Stories going.

On the third view, you can a) select college types, b) select years, and c) select student types.  Then, the control at lower right will allow you to break out the data in one of several ways, to compare one region to another, or men to women, for instance.  The top chart shows numbers, and the bottom shows percentage change since the first year chosen.

If you think we have a problem with men, I encourage you to use the "Carnegie" filter to cycle through the types.  If you don't want to do this, you can spend a few minutes to see the point on this Twitter thread (a thread is a series of connected tweets).

Do we have a crisis when it comes to men and college enrollment?  Sort of.  Is it unexpected in light of the economy?  I don't think so.  Is it widespread?  (Actually, I think it is contained most--for now--to one sector...and it's not just men who are affected there.)

As always, let me know what you see and what you think.  Thanks for reading.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

First-year student (freshman) migration, 2022

A new approach to freshman migration, which is always a popular post on Higher Ed Data Stories. If you're a regular reader, you can go right to the visualization and start interacting with it.  And I can't stress enough: You need to use the controls and click away to get the most from these visualizations. If you're new, this post focuses on one of the most interesting data elements in IPEDS: The geographic origins of first-year (freshman) students over time.  My data set includes institutions in the 50 states and DC.  It includes four-year public and four-year, private not-for-profits that participate in Title IV programs; and it includes traditional institutions using the Carnegie classification (Doctoral, Masters, Baccalaureate, and Special Focus Schools in business, engineering, and art/design. Data from other institutions is noisy and often unreliable, or (in the case of colleges in Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and other territories, often shows close to 100% of enro...
Post a Comment
Read more

Changes in Educational Attainment, 1940 to 2018

Note: A few people have pointed out that some data on this appears to be slightly askew, even though the story is mostly unchanged.  So don't cite it. Don't look at the viz yet.  Wait until I tell you. This is an update to a post I did about five years ago , showing the growth in educational attainment in the US over time. I thought then, and I still think, it's among the most jaw-dropping visualizations I've done, not, of course, for the visualization skills, but for the story it tells, and perhaps, the future it holds for us. This is from Table A-1 on this page of the Census Bureau. First, before you dive into it, take a guess about the percentage of adults in the US, aged 35-54 with a bachelor's degree or higher.  Got a guess?  If  you have a college degree, you probably said something like fifty or sixty percent, based on my sampling of twenty people or so.  If you didn't, your guess is probably much lower, usually ten or fifteen percent.  T...
Post a Comment
Read more