Skip to main content

A final post as a farewell and thanks

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 to the latter, but it will mostly be written for presidents, provosts, and Board chairs.
  • Additionally, this Blogger platform is one of the few that will accept embedded Tableau visualizations, but the platform itself is old and doesn't work the way I want it to.  It's essentially the same one I started on in 2013.  And Google has a way of getting rid of its free products with little notice.  So thank you, Google, and thanks to th 1,890,000 visitors over the years (except the spammers).
  • Sort of related is the collapse of technology.  Not only did Google make it harder to share this content by eliminating subscriptions and notifications, but other places where I shared and promoted my work are also less valuable than they used to be: Twitter, for instance, and Facebook, where I recently left a college admissions group I helped create over a disagreement about sophomoric behavior by the moderators.  Tableau, too, deprecated some of the technology that allowed the older visualizations to run. They're gone, unless I try to re-publish them, which I'm not inclined to do at this point.
  • And finally, the East Coker reason, which I've pointed to before. It's from one of the Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot, and I've always been struck by this stanza:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

I think I've said (or tried to say) almost everything that needs to be said about our business, often on more than one occasion: 
  • Standardized testing is folly for college admissions purposes 
  • Students with advantages get most of the breaks in admissions
  • College Board is a business, not an educational entity, and letting them drive education is bad for everyone (except College Board)
  • Enrollment is complex, and the media frequently gets the story wrong precisely because they take a high-level, superficial view of the industry
  • The elite institutions aren't elite when it comes to their moral responsibilities to do more for access and opportunity
Of course, a lot of the time I tried not to lecture, but rather to put the data in front of people so they could see and interact for themselves.  I hope I surprised a few people and confounded a few more, and I hope the data here made a difference in the lives of a few students, parents, or counselors.

And finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't offer a word of thanks to Tom Mortensen, who was the first person I knew who took publicly available data and tried to tell a story--a really important story--with it.  He was the person who shone light on things for me, and helped me stay committed to this blog over the past eleven-and-a-half years.

Thanks to him, and thanks to you for coming along on this exploration. 

In my beginning is my end.
In my end is my beginning. 

Comments

  1. Thank you, Jon! I have learned so much from you over the years, and I wish you a long and healthy retirement.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Truly a pleasure reading your information/thoughts/wisdom over the years. Thank you for everything. Wishing you the best.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I have enjoyed every post of yours I read and shared several. Will miss stopping by, thanks for the insights!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Many thanks for your important work over the years. You have always spoken truth to power (especially the profitable testing industry).

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

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...