Higher Ed Data Stories

The College Board has done a nice job of compiling and analyzing data on charged college tuition and fees; alas, as I've said before, they, like NCES, put their data in tables that are summarized and formatted for people who want to print them out.  It's good information, but hard to extract any insight. Go ahead and download the spreadsheet in the right-hand column from this link , and then go to table 5.  Do you see any patterns? It's why I like data visualization tools like Tableau Software: Not only does it make it easy to turn rows of data into something visual that tells a story; it makes it easy for me to allow you to see what you want. This shows average tuition charges for public two-year and four-year, as well as private, four-year institutions by state, from 2004 to 2013.  The charge is weighted by enrollment, so it shows what the average student was charged at those institutions.  It's gross charges, before net price. As you can see by playing wi...

Well, of course it does. I remember my first professional conference in 1985: AACRAO in Cincinnati. Fred Hargadon, who was then the former dean of admissions at Stanford (before he became the dean at Princeton) was filling in for someone else at the last minute.  I was impressed by how eloquent he was on a moment's notice, but mostly I remember a few things he said, most notably (from memory): "In all my years of doing this work, I've learned only two things: First, that if you had to choose the worst time for someone to pick a college, it would be age 17, and second, the block on which you are born has more to do with where you end up in life than any other single factor." It appears he was right, expect this shows states, and where the students who were scheduled to graduate in the class of 2008 ended up.  You can choose what you want to look at and the map will update the color of the state to show that value. Don't try to add up the numbers to 100, as t...

The College Board's Education Pays series has some interesting data in in, but much of it is in Excel spreadsheets formatted for printing.  You need to do a little work to extract the specific insight you want. My last post had to do with "Who's Going to College," by income group.  It's probably no surprise to anyone that students from high-income families go to college at greater rates than those from low-income families. This data shows actual attainment: Who graduated high school; who attended at least some college, and who has at least a bachelor's degree, by gender and ethnicity.  Interesting patterns, of course, but in some sense, given the distribution of wealth in America, they tell the same story. Learn About Tableau

We hear a lot about college attendance, and how we should encourage low-income students to go to college.  And I agree.  Look at my previous post, and you might understand why more don't: Family income has stayed stagnant for years while college costs have risen dramatically. Here is a hot-off-the-presses report from the NCES Digest of Education Statistics, 2013 .  It shows college attendance rates by income since 1975.  There is some good news and some not-so-good news: While all income levels have shown increases in college attendance rates, low-income students still go to college at a rate far below average, and far below students from middle- and high-income families. In fact, students from low-income families today go to college at a rate lower than students from high-income families in 1975. PS: If you happen to know anyone at NCES, could you ask them to put their data in a better format?  It was great to format Excel sheets for report-printing 15 ...

Go ahead and Google " Low-income students and why they don't go to college ."  Or just click on that link. Come back when you think you know the answer. I suspect you'll find lots of stuff about culture, lack of information, parental support, weak schools, or no college guidance. But what if it's something else, like--I don't know--the perceived ability to pay? Take a look at this Census Bureau data.  It shows changes in family income by quintile since 1967.  On the top is dollars (current or nominal) and the bottom is percent change since the first year shown. You'll see that the lowest 20% and the lowest 40% haven't seen much growth in income over that time, compared to the top 5%.  (In case you don't know, 2012 dollars means everything is adjusted for inflation so you can compare a dollar today vs. a dollar at a time in the past.  Nominal dollars are not adjusted for inflation, but a "dollar" in 1973 is worth more than a "...

Someone once joked that no industry has a longer view of its future than higher education.  In some sense, this is true; if students weren't born 17 years ago, they almost certainly are not going to enroll next fall.  The only exception, I pointed out, was the funeral industry, which knows about 80 years ahead of time what its market will look like. Via the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) we now have a compelling and interesting look at the future.  Their series, " Knocking at the College Door ," has, for a long time, provided a glimpse of the future of public school enrollments.  Thus, in a very real way, we're seeing a glimpse of the future of America. This visualization shows three different views of the data: A total with ethnicity breakouts; a comparison of regions; and a simple bar chart showing percent of total.  If you're interested in a zoomed view, you can filter to any region or state on the first and third. Note: For...

In a recent post, I wrote about the Admissions Arms Race , and who had come out victorious.  The short answer was "almost no one."  I rolled up admission rates (percent of applicants admitted) and yield rates (percent of those offered admission who enroll) and showed them over time.  These variables are pretty common parlance in college admissions; everyone with experience seems to know them.  But I showed them only aggregated by type of institution; averages often mask details contained in them.  To add some detail, I've now plotted them for every four-year, degree-granting institution that enrolls freshmen. In that post I also introduced "Draw Rate," a term few had heard of.  It's a simple calculation: You take the yield rate and divide it by the admit rate.  So, for instance, Harvard, with a yield rate of about 84% and an admit rate of about 6% (2012) has a Draw Rate of about 14.  Given that the industry average is about .6 (not six.... point...

I saw an interesting article in Insider Higher Ed yesterday.  The White House invited several college presidents to discuss ways in which we, as a nation, might do more to enroll low-income students in college. Excuse me, selective colleges.  Because how many students a university rejects on its way to prestige is clearly meaningful. Great idea, right?  Yes, but actually no. The presidents they invited tend to be from universities (shown as the red dots) that are a lot less successful in enrolling low-income students than they might be; this is especially true for the private universities invited. You can see for yourself: This interactive visualization plots Percentage of Freshmen with Pell Grants along the x-axis, and Calculated Mean SAT CR+M along the y-axis.  Right away, you notice a relationship: The pursuit of prestige, which means increasing SAT scores, almost assures you of enrolling fewer low-income students, as the relationship between SAT and income...

Short answer: No one. This data is from the Delta Cost Project , a longitudinal study of college and university finance and administration, showing hundreds of institutional variables over time. This particular set shows the years 2000-2010, but there is no admissions data reported until 2003, which is itself interesting. The race for more applications has been successful: Apps are up about 50% over that time, even though the high school population has not grown that much.  Enrollment is up, too, but only by about 16%, which proves the old adage of mine that, "If they weren't born 18 years ago, they aren't going to enroll this fall." You can look at this by region or by Carnegie Type: I clustered the myriad of Carnegie classifications into four groups.  Although there are some variations, for the most part, the trend applies to all types, and all regions.  Of interest is the drop in the Draw Rate, which is yield/admit rate, a proxy for market position.  You can...

You can't open a newspaper these days--at least those of you who still read newspapers--without reading something about college tuition.  Usually, the takeaway from the article is something like: It's out of control No one can afford college any more Most colleges charge $40,000 just for tuition And, as is often the case, actual data can help dispel these myths.  It is true, of course, that college tuition has been increasing rapidly for some time.  Not 500%, as MSN suggests , especially not when adjusted for inflation.  But it's gone up fast, nonetheless.   The thing most people forget is that about 78% of all full-time, undergraduate college enrollment in the not-for-profit sector attends public institutions; in fact, about 9% of all college enrollment in the U.S. is in California Community Colleges. (If you want to re-create these findings, download the spreadsheet from that link and do it yourself.  The visualization is not very clear.) ...

Here's one that's a little more complicated, so I'll give you a head start on how to look at this data. This shows a lot of data from IPEDS 2011: Sticker costs, and net cost by parental income (3 groups) on the top, and information about financial aid on the bottom, including the percentage of students on Pell Grants, the percentage of students with any aid, loans, or grants. I've started with the view of the universe: About 1,450 Colleges and Universities that are at the Carnegie Classification of Baccalaureate or above. Your first move is to look at the data as a pattern, noticing the red squares on top, and the blue and gold squares on the bottom.  They show sticker tuition, the percentage of students with Pell Grants, and the percentage of students with any financial aid.  Got it? Now, under "Selectivity" choose "Most Selective" and watch what happens.  Maybe the opposite of what you think might: As costs go up, net prices go down for poo...

The Government Shutdown of October, 2013 has left many of us in the cold: No access to much of the data we use from places like NCES , or IPEDS , or Data.gov . As I wrote in the post below about the age distribution of college students, Archive.org can get you some of the information you want, provided it's in existing tables or spreadsheets on government websites. But you still can't get to the databases that generate custom reports. One alternative where you can go looking is Guidestar . From there, I downloaded the FY 2011 Tax Returns (IRS Form 990) for all eight of the Ivy League institutions, and manually put the data into a database. While the most interesting stories are not always on the front page of the return, you can look at the high-level breakouts of revenue sources and allocation of expenses. On this visualization there are three tabs across the top: The first is the total revenue (orange bar) and expenses for FY 2010 and FY 2011. Beneath that is the dif...