Skip to main content

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 many colleges, with substantial enrollment, who already use the word "The" at the beginning of their name who could have and should have protested this; there are also many who start out with "University" who might be tempted in casual conversation to throw a "The" at the start and are now afraid of being sued; the same for any place called "College." 

As you will see, most college and university enrollment (total graduate and undergraduate) falls into the "Other" category; this includes enrollment at places like Kansas State University (begins with "Kansas") or the four that start with "Loyola" or the twelve that start with "Concordia."  

Then comes "University," followed by "The" followed by "College."

You can explore on these three charts below, using the filters if you wish.

Guess which university you won't find on the "The" list?  



Anyway, I'm on vacation.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Changes in AP Scores, 2022 to 2024

Used to be, with a little work, you could download very detailed data on AP results from the College Board website: For every state, and for every course, you could see performance by ethnicity.  And, if you wanted to dig really deep, you could break out details by private and public schools, and by grade level.  I used to publish the data every couple of years. Those days are gone.  The transparency The College Board touts as a value seems to have its limits, and I understand this to some extent: Racists loved to twist the data using single-factor analysis, and that's not good for a company who is trying to make business inroads with under-represented communities as they cloak their pursuit of revenue as an altruistic push toward access. They still publish data, but as I wrote about in my last post , it's far less detailed; what's more, what is easily accessible is fairly sterile, and what's more detailed seems to be structured in a way that suggests the company doesn&
Post a Comment
Read more

Freshman Migration, 1986 to 2020

(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
Post a Comment
Read more

The Highly Rejective Colleges

If you're not following Akil Bello on Twitter, you should be.  His timeline is filled with great insights about standardized testing, and he takes great effort to point out racism (both subtle and not-so-subtle) in higher education, all while throwing in references to the Knicks and his daughter Enid, making the experience interesting, compelling, and sometimes, fun. Recently, he created the term " highly rejective colleges " as a more apt description for what are otherwise called "highly selective colleges."  As I've said before, a college that admits 15% of applicants really has a rejections office, not an admissions office.  The term appears to have taken off on Twitter, and I hope it will stick. So I took a look at the highly rejectives (really, that's all I'm going to call them from now on) and found some interesting patterns in the data. Take a look:  The 1,132 four-year, private colleges and universities with admissions data in IPEDS are incl
Post a Comment
Read more