Finding your major

This is a popular post with anyone who works with high school students, and I've just updated it with fresh data from 2021 graduates; it's mainly helpful for two types of cases:

Students who are looking for very uncommon majors
Students who want to see which colleges have the largest departments in their specific major

This is pretty straightforward, and I've put the instructions in tool tips; just hover over the icons in the shape of an I you'll see on the visualization.

There are three ways to filter to get just the results your student needs:

At top left, you can choose the academic elements, like broad academic category (health care, or business, for instance); academic major; and degree level (it defaults to bachelor's degrees, but you can change that if you want.) To find a major, type any part of the name, and press "Enter." You'll see a list with all the possible matches. So if you type "Eng" you'll get Engineering as well as English
At top right, you can help students find degree-earners who are like them, by filtering on gender or ethnicity
Right below that, you can filter the colleges: What type, where they're located, and whether they have a religious affiliation or not.

If you use this in your for-profit work, you can support my web hosting and software costs by buying me a coffee. Click here. If you're a parent or a high school counselor, just dive in, below.

These data are pretty complex and required a lot of cleaning and restructuring, and I've spot checked it, but as always, it's not guaranteed to be 100% accurate. And, as always, let me know if you spot anything interesting or problematic.

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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

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

Doctoral recipients by bachelor's degree-granting institution, 2016-2020

Each time I publish this visualization I get a lot of traffic on the site, and I can see why. It shows all doctoral recipients (in 2016-2020) broken out by where they received their bachelor's degrees. So, for instance, the top level view shows that UC Berkeley is the alma mater of more doctoral recipients than any other institution, followed by The University of Michigan and Cornell University. That would be interesting, but of course, these are large institutions, and it's natural to think lots of graduates will lead to lots of doctoral degrees. No surprise there. So the visualization allows you to look at the types of colleges you or your students might want: Select a state, select public or private, select by Carnegie type if you wish. You can also look at HBCUs if you'd like. Most important, you can filter by doctoral degree, so if you want to see which institution sends the most students to doctorates in chemistry, you can do so. To head off the questions I get ev

Higher Ed Data Stories

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