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Showing posts from June, 2022

Abortion policy and freshman migration, 2018 and 2020

The recent SCOTUS ruling overturning Roe v. Wade has set off an interesting debate about student college choice.  People who favor legal access to abortion seem convinced that students--especially women--will change their college plans based on the climate in the state of the college(s) they're considering. Will it?  I don't know.  I do know that when everyone seems to be convinced of something related to college admissions and student choice, the reality is often very different than the predictions, after all is said and done.  And on the other hand, this feels different, somehow.  To repeat: I don't know. Of course, the ability of students to migrate across state lines is generally reserved for those with more wealth and privilege, and as I've demonstrated before ( here and here ), educated and wealthier communities tend to vote Democratic, and thus, are more likely to be pro-choice and more likely to be upset by the SCOTUS decision.  And I, like a lot of people, live

Vacation Fun: The

I'm on vacation this week, and didn't plan to do anything on the blogs unless something really pressing came up. Something really pressing came up. It borders on scandalous. By now, you've probably heard that a certain university successfully trademarked the word "The."   How this happens, I have no idea; I'm not a lawyer (and that sound you hear is all the lawyers saying, "no kidding.")  But it happened. And that's not the really pressing thing, nor is it the scandalous thing.  But follow along. The news bothered me and others on Twitter, so I felt compelled to take a look at university names, specifically the first word of their names, using official designations in IPEDS.  I broke this into three categories: Those whose names started with "The," those whose names started with "University," and those whose names started with "College," plus the category of "Other." My thinking was that there are already m