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.