Higher Ed Data Stories

It's been said the Internet is like a party: You don't have to announce that you're leaving. But this will be the final post on Higher Ed Data Stories.  After 4,183 days, it's time to call it quits. To save myself the time necessary to reply to both of you who are still faithfully reading these posts, I feel compelled to offer a few words of explanation. First, of course, is that I'm retiring from my full-time position at a university.  Much of what I did here was simply a sanitized version of what I was doing for my own work anyway, going back to the first post in 2013, which, if I recall, I was preparing for a conference presentation. Also, I'll be doing more custom work for clients (he said, hopefully, as he watches higher ed teetering on the brink from the attacks of government and the public.)  I may do some consulting after I retire, via Enrollment VP and the companion blog .  (I guess this means I'll be doing requests, after all.)  You can subscribe ...

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...