Skip to main content

The College Finder

Note: A few people have commented on slow loading with the visualization.  If you have troubles, click here to be taken right to the visualization.  It should open in a new tab and you can follow along from there.   

This is always a popular post with high school counselors, IECs, parents, and students who are looking for general information on degrees awarded, or a very specific combination of academic programs, location, and other institutional characteristics.

It uses IPEDS data I downloaded as soon as I can when it became available (and before a looming government shutdown), and shows all 1,700 majors recognized by the federal government in the IPEDS system, using CIP codes, and the number of degrees awarded by college in any selected area.

For instance, you might have a question about which college awards the most degrees in French Language and Literature: A few clicks, and you find it's the University of Arizona.  If you want a colder climate, choose the Great Lakes region, for instance, and you'll see it's The University of Michigan.  If you want a private college, another two clicks and you find it's Oberlin.

This takes a lot of time and effort to bring about, and if you use this in your business, you can support hosting, software, and the cost of my time by Buying Me A Coffee (click here). If you're a high school counselor or a student or a parent, please skip the link and go right to the next paragraph.

Here's how you work this visualization.  In the top right, you can choose whether you want to see degrees awarded to all students, men, women, or any federally recognized ethnic or racial group.  You decide; I think it's especially helpful for finding good places for students of color, or women in STEM, for instance.

Along the top, I recommend you choose a family first: Agriculture, or Engineering, or Business, for instance, and then use the degree name to find a specific major.  In the major box, start typing a few letters of the major you're looking for: The more you type, the better.  Typing C-O-M, for instance, will allow you to choose from Communications or Computer Science or Comedy Writing, depending on what family you've selected.  The chart will update.

Along the right, you can limit the type of institutions displayed: By control, by size, by region or state, or a few other variables.  If you ever want to start over, use the controls at lower right.

A lot of the ways I've shared these posts in the past have changed, so you should feel free to share this with anyone you wish.  The more, the merrier.

Let me know if anything looks off with this view.  It's a fresh data set, and although I've spot checked it, there is always a chance something is out of kilter.  

Comments

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...

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...