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...

 I'm not sure where to begin on this one, so let's veer off topic a bit.   I've decided I'll likely be phasing out Higher Ed Data Stories in the near future as I go into retirement and start  my new venture , which is soft launched but not officially open for business.  When I do, I'll be posting regularly on  my blog over there , but won't be putting everything out on the web for free, as I've been doing on this site.  I do appreciate the contributions people made on the Buy Me Coffee site, but the hosting, software, and labor costs never balanced with the revenue, and while there was a lot of good will that came from my work, I was still in a deficit situation (especially on the time part) and I'll need to dedicate that to the business side of things.  Medicare Parts B and D ain't free, you know. But this is some unfinished business, and it might be a good place to end.  You know I've been personally opposed to the very idea of the SAT and ...

Attainment has always been an interesting topic for me, every since I first got stunned into disbelief when I looked at the data over time.  Even looking at shorter periods can lead to some revelations that many don't make sense at first. Here is the latest data from NCES, published in the Digest of Education Statistics . Please note that this is for informational purposes only, and I've not even attempted to visualize the standard errors in this data, which vary from state-to-state.  There are four views year, all looking at educational attainment by state in 2012 and 2022.   The first shows data on a map: Choose the year, and choose the level of attainment.  Note that the top three categories can be confusing: BA means a Bachelor's degree only; Grad degree means at least a Master's (or higher, of course); and BA or more presumably combines those two.  Again, standard errors might mean the numbers don't always add up perfectly. The second shows the data o...

This now-annual post is one that boggles and befuddles people, especially those who think that your yield rate is something you control by flipping switches.  In reality, yield rate is controlled by something much more powerful: Algebra. First, let's review what yield rate is:  Colleges get applications, and they admit a certain percentage of them.  In aggregate colleges admit the vast majority of applicants.  Even though this visualization shows an aggregate admit rate of 58.3% in 2023 (the red line at bottom left), the set of colleges in the data only include colleges required to report to IPEDS; this excludes community colleges and any other institution that considers itself an Open Admissions institution. Of that 58%, some percentage enroll, and that's called the yield rate.  As you can see, the yield rate (the purple line at bottom center) has been falling every single year since 2001.  This is a function of math.  Applications (the orange bars at...

This is a popular post each year with high school and independent counselors working with students who are already thinking about a doctorate.  It shows the undergraduate institutions of doctoral recipients from 1958 to 2023.  (It does not show where the doctorate was earned, to be clear.) It's based on data I downloaded from the National Science Foundation using their custom tool .  It's a little clunky, and--this is important--it classifies academic areas differently before 2020 and after, but with a little (OK, a lot) of data wrangling over the long weekend, we have something for the data junkies out there. This is for fun and entertainment only, because, as I indicated, the categories are not quite the same, and for the sake of clarity, I had to combine similar (but not identical) disciplines. There are two views, using the tabs across the top.  The "All Data" view allows you to filter to your heart's content.  The purple boxes allow you to limit the type o...

The cost of college has been a hot topic for a while now, and even though some studies suggest the net cost of college has been falling post-COVID, it's clear that sticker prices have not been.  And because the overwhelming majority of college and university students in the US attend public institutions, that's a good place to start the discussion. This is data from IPEDS, showing published cost about 530 public, four-year institutions that award the bachelor's degree, excluding community colleges that have been creeping into that category over time. Each dot represents an institution, and the data are from 2009, 2016, and 2023 to show long-term trends. The dots are colored by geographic region. The data are displayed four ways, from left to right and default to published Tuition and Fees: Resident, Nonresident, the premium nonresidents pay (in dollars), and the premium not residents pay (as a percentage of what residents pay.)  You can change this to show just tuition or ...

A while ago, I made the claim that Oregon State University has the longest streak of consecutive years of fall-over-fall enrollment growth of any public, Research 1 university in America.  A few people have asked me, not exactly doubting the claim, but thinking maybe I had made a mistake, for the source of it. This started as a curiosity: I knew from our own internal documentation that the last time OSU (the oldest OSU...not the one in Ohio or Oklahoma) had a fall-to-fall enrollment drop was 1996, and I was curious to see if any other institution could make that claim. So I went to the  IPEDS Data Center  and downloaded the data.  It's below.  First, a few points: My comparison group is 108 Public, four-year, Research 1 Universities as designated by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education as of Fall, 2022, the latest IPEDS data available. The R1 designation is actually called "Doctoral Institutions: Very High Research Activity" but the nickname R1 is a hold...

Graduation rates are always a hot topic in higher education, but often for the wrong reason.  To demonstrate, I offer my parents.  Here is a portrait of Agnes and Mark, married May 4, 1946. One night while I was talking to my brother, he asked, "Do you think mom was the way she was because dad was the way he was, or do you think dad was the way he was because mom was the way she was?"  To which I replied, "yes."  My point, of course, is that in complex relationships, it's always difficult--impossible, actually--to detangle cause and effect. And, despite the Student Affairs perspective that graduation rates are a treatment effect, I maintain that they are actually a selection effect.  As I've written about before , it's pretty easy to predict a college's six-year graduation rate if you know one data point: The mean SAT score of the incoming class.  That's because the SAT rolls a lot of predictive factors into one index number.  These include acade...

Good news: We have new IPEDS data on average net cost.  Bad news: Because IPEDS is IPEDS, it's data from the 2021-22 Academic Year.  This is pretty straightforward: Each dot represents a public institution, colored by region, showing the average net price for first-year students entering in that year.  IPEDS breaks out average net price by income bands, so you can see what a family with income of $30,000 to $48,000 pays, for instance, by using the filters at right. You can also limit the institutions displayed by using the top three filters: Doctoral institutions in the Far West, or in Illinois, for instance.  If you want to see a specific institution highlighted, use that control.  Just type part of the name of the institution, like this example, and make your selection:  Average net price shows The Total Cost of Attendance (COA), which includes tuition, room, board, books, transportation, and personal expenses, minus all grant aid.  It does not inclu...

I've always been fascinated by the idea of "colleges."  We think we know what we mean when we say it, but do we really? When some people say "college" they might mean any four-year college that enrolls undergraduates.  Others might mean everything except for-profit colleges.  Do you include community colleges in your group?  Some people do, and others don't. And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that when some major news outlets talk about "college" they are really talking about the 15 or  50 institutions their readers or listeners fascinate over. Well, now you can see the answer.  Sort of.  I started with IPEDS data, which includes all post-secondary institutions that receive Title IV aid.  There are many institutions in the US that don't and although they can report to IPEDS, they are not required to, and many don't. But if we start with all the IPEDS institutions that enrolled at least one student in 2022, you get 5,...

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-spe...

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 Newspe...

OK, I admit it.  That headline is clickbait.  I have no idea which colleges might close in the near future, but I want to take a look at the problem from 30,000 feet. This is prompted by the recent announcement that Eastern Nazarene College in Massachusetts will close . It comes on the heels of several other announcements like this over the past few years.  And of course, because we've become accustomed to colleges surviving for long periods even during bad times, the surprise makes people wonder who's next. The meta-answer will surprise you: While we of course feel bad for the people who lose jobs, the students who are displaced, and the community that finds itself dealing with the loss of a respected institution, these trends are small blips in the industry.  In fact, the institutions most likely to close (probably) collectively account for a small fraction of enrollment at America's colleges and universities. Follow along.   One of the challenges in talk...

This is a reboot of a visualization I did in 2018, which I found fascinating, but which didn't get much traffic at the time, and thus, I've not refreshed it.  But I still find it compelling and instructive. Each year, the Association of American Medical Colleges publishes a lot of data about admission to medical colleges in the US. But frankly, it's a mess, and takes a lot of effort to clean up and visualize: Each link is a separate spreadsheet, and each spreadsheet has spacer rows and merged cells and lots of stuff that needs to be scrubbed (carefully) before analyzing and visualizing.  So, if you use this work in a professional capacity, I'd appreciate your support for my time, software and hosting costs at this link . As a reminder, I don't accept contributions from high school counselors, students, or parents who are using the site.  (And if you know anyone at AAMC, tell them raw data would be much appreciated). There are seven views here, some of which combine...

This will be the second part of a series of blogposts about how to use IPEDS, The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System of the federal government. If you're just starting, I highly recommend you go to the  first post  to bring yourself up to speed on the basics.  If you don't, some of this might not make sense. In that post, I covered several of the ways you can extract simple tables of data for a single year or a single institution; or summary data, including fairly basic and interactive charts when you're looking for something simple.  In this one, I'll go over how to extract custom data over multiple years, and then walk you through the frustrating process of making sense of the output.  Warning: I get a bit cranky about this, because the data formats are largely unchanged since I started doing this perhaps 20 years ago, and they create far more work for the end user than they should. The last post covered the options in italics.  This one will ...