More Gender Breakouts of Admission Data

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 admission rates at the highly rejectives over time; and, for anyone who wants to download the data using the little icon at the bottom, a spreadsheet format. Note: IPEDS just started collecting application data on non-binary students, so it will be a while before any trend analysis is possible. For 2022, I only included students who self-identified as male or female.)

Rather than explain the interactivity, I've put two buttons on the first view: Hover over the Orange Plus Sign to read some caveats about the data; and hover over the lightbulb for information about how to interact.

As always, I'd love to hear what you see.

Comments

Educational Attainment and the Presidential Elections

I've been fascinated for a while by the connection between political leanings and education: The correlation is so strong that I once suggested that perhaps Republicans were so anti-education because, in general, places with a higher percentage of bachelor's degree recipients were more likely to vote for Democrats. The 2024 presidential election puzzled a lot of us in higher education, and perhaps these charts will show you why: We work and probably hang around mostly people with college degrees (or higher). Our perception is limited. With the 2024 election data just out , I thought I'd take a look at the last three elections and see if the pattern I noticed in 2016 and 2020 held. Spoiler: It did, mostly. Before you dive into this, a couple of tips: Alaska's data is always reported in a funky way, so just ignore it here. It's a small state (in population, that is) and it's very red. It doesn't change the overall trends even if I could figure out how to c...

First-year student (freshman) migration, 2022

A new approach to freshman migration, which is always a popular post on Higher Ed Data Stories. If you're a regular reader, you can go right to the visualization and start interacting with it. And I can't stress enough: You need to use the controls and click away to get the most from these visualizations. If you're new, this post focuses on one of the most interesting data elements in IPEDS: The geographic origins of first-year (freshman) students over time. My data set includes institutions in the 50 states and DC. It includes four-year public and four-year, private not-for-profits that participate in Title IV programs; and it includes traditional institutions using the Carnegie classification (Doctoral, Masters, Baccalaureate, and Special Focus Schools in business, engineering, and art/design. Data from other institutions is noisy and often unreliable, or (in the case of colleges in Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and other territories, often shows close to 100% of enro...

Changes in Educational Attainment, 1940 to 2018

Note: A few people have pointed out that some data on this appears to be slightly askew, even though the story is mostly unchanged. So don't cite it. Don't look at the viz yet. Wait until I tell you. This is an update to a post I did about five years ago , showing the growth in educational attainment in the US over time. I thought then, and I still think, it's among the most jaw-dropping visualizations I've done, not, of course, for the visualization skills, but for the story it tells, and perhaps, the future it holds for us. This is from Table A-1 on this page of the Census Bureau. First, before you dive into it, take a guess about the percentage of adults in the US, aged 35-54 with a bachelor's degree or higher. Got a guess? If you have a college degree, you probably said something like fifty or sixty percent, based on my sampling of twenty people or so. If you didn't, your guess is probably much lower, usually ten or fifteen percent. T...

Higher Ed Data Stories

Search This Blog