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Showing posts from February, 2024

First-year student diversity in American colleges and universities, 2018-2022

I started this visualization to show how first-year classes at the highly rejective colleges had changed since COVID-19 forced them all to go to a test-optional approach for the Fall of 2021.  But it sort of took on a life of its own after that, as big, beefy data sets often do. The original point was to help discount the conventional wisdom, which is propped up by a limited, old study of a small set of colleges that showed test-optional policies didn't affect diversity.  I did this post last year , after just one year of data made it fairly clear they did at the institutions that had the luxury of selecting and shaping their class.  This year I took it a little farther.  The views, using the tabs across the top, show the same trends (now going to 2022) for Public Land Grants, Public Flagships, the Ivy and Ivy+ Institutions.  In each case, choose one using the control. Note that I had colored the years by national trends: 2018 and 2019 are pre-test optional, gray is COVID, and blue