Higher Ed Data Stories

I've written a lot about yield rates over time, and I've also written about differences in admission patterns among male and female applicants here and here ; I've decided to take a fresh look at both based on some continuing discussions I've heard recently.  You have, of course, heard about the crisis of male enrollment in American colleges, which, if you look at the data, is really a crisis of enrollment at Community Colleges.  Far be it from me to insist on data, however. Here is the same data for women, just to point out that there are differences.  Whether we should celebrate increasing attainment among young women or decry the inability of young men to keep up is your choice.  Regardless, here is a detailed breakout of these patterns as they show up in admissions over time.  There are four views here: A summary on tab one (using the tabs across the top); ratios of women to men at all stages of the process and estimated applications per student; gender-specific ad

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&

Last night, I looked at a chart that had been tweeted out by Marco Learning , a terrific source for information about The College Board's AP Program.  It showed the percentage of all scores graded 4 and 5 over time by subject, and there were some glaring points: Lots of big increases in certain subjects that didn't seem to make sense.  Turns out, their data was correct. Wanting to dive down a little deeper, I went to the College Board website to look at the data myself, and to "download" it for some additional analysis.  I put the word download in quotation marks on purpose. I have a history with College Board, of course.  I used to download the very rich AP data by state, exam, and ethnicity they'd post on their site and put it into an interactive format that pulled out insight better than the large, text-exclusive spreadsheets they'd post.  Then--despite the organization's oft-cited commitment to transparency--they stopped .   In an example of Newspeak