Higher Ed Data Stories

You know I love to use Tableau Software , and I wish more people in higher education did, too.  So I took the Tableau challenge to see what I could do in three minutes. Take a look at this table of data I used for bachelor's degrees, and the companion one for master's degrees and see what patterns jump out at you.  Go ahead.  I'll wait. I spent about 20 minutes cleaning up the data, but only three minutes visualizing it once I pulled it into Tableau (and that took another 20 seconds or so.) Here is the video, in real time, of how I built this dashboard: And here is the finished product.  I ran out of time, or I'd have spent 10 more seconds to change the colors on the bar charts, since orange/blue was already in use to show concentration on the map. Higher Ed People: No more excuses.  Make your data meaningful and interesting with just a little work. Learn About Tableau

Blogger's note: With 10,000 views (about 50 times average) I've received a lot of comments.  You may want to read this first before responding) While public school teacher salaries are not exactly a Higher Education topic, it's not too hard to see the connection. This is NCES Data from the 2013 Digest of Education Statistics, showing teacher salaries over time by state. The view defaults to Constant (inflation adjusted) dollars and 2013, but you can choose any year and nominal (not adjusted for inflation) dollars if you'd like.  The map color codes for the year selected so you can see the range, and the bar chart shows the state-by-state breakout; the weighted US average on is shown on the bar chart in blue. See the NCES table for notes about interpreting the data. Note: My Tableau coding skills are still not what I'd like them to be; if anyone wants to download this and help me create parameters to allow the viewer to compare states by percent change ove...

I started with an interesting question: How many private colleges and universities in the country give everyone--100% of freshman--some type of institutional aid? It was easy to get the answer: 183 of the 1,066 who have enough data in IPEDS to calculate such things. That's 17%. For some, it's understandable: Berea College, Cooper Union, the College of the Ozarks, or Olin, for instance.  They all have special populations and special funding models.  But what about the others? I arrayed the world of private, not-for-profits on a scatter chart, on top. The x-axis is calculated mean ACT scores (the average of the 25th and 75th percentile as reported in IPEDS).  The y-axis is the draw rate, which is yield rate divided by admit rate.  It's a power measure of market position, notwithstanding some very small non-selective institutions report bad data to IPEDS that makes their draw look high.  (The average draw is about .7, for instance; but Harvard's is 14, and Stan...

From the still-rolling-out NCES 2013 Digest of Education Statistics comes this: Degrees awarded by type of degree and state in 2011-2012. Choose the type(s) of institution(s) you'd like to include, and then the degree level: Associate's, Bachelor's, Master's or Doctoral.  The blue bar shows the number by state, and the colored bars in the right hand column show the percent of that state's population awarded that degree in 2012.  The maps at the bottom are colored by the raw numbers; hover over any data point on the map or bar charts to see the details. I've started this showing Associate's degrees, and including only public and private, not-for-profit institutions. If you'd like to add private, for-profit institutions, you can easily do that, but the numbers and especially percentages get skewed to Arizona and Iowa, due to large for-profit corporations that are housed there. The degrees they award roll up to the home state, even though the majority o...

Amid talk about new or exciting or trending degree programs, there is this: A visualization of all bachelor's degrees awarded from 1971 to 2012. This shows the data three different ways, but all are colored identically by major or program.  The top left shows the total number of degrees awarded in each year shown; the top right shows everything scaled to 100%, and the bottom chart is a "bump chart" that shows popularity over time. In order to make sense of this, you're going to have to interact. Use the color legend at right, and click on a program of interest.  Then, in the upper right of the color legend, click the little pencil.  You'll see that program highlighted in all three displays.  Click the programs to your heart's content. You can also hover over the highlighted selection on any of the charts to see the data for that year in a text box.  To return to the full display, click the pencil again. I'm astounded at the relative stabili...

It's a common refrain: State funding for higher education is being cut.  Is it? And if so, by how much? Below are three views of the data: On the first dashboard, you see two line charts: The top shows changes in state and local appropriations for higher education over time; on the bottom you see percentage change from 2000--2010.  Not that these are nominal (non-inflation adjusted) dollars.  If you want to compare to inflation, you should know that CPI rose about 27% between 2000 and 2010. These are also not adjusted for enrollment; it's possible, of course, to show a large increase that does not cover increasing enrollments, and this is likely especially true for states with population growth in the south and southwest. And this data is subject to the anchoring fallacy: There is nothing magic about choosing the year 2000 to start. There is no way to tell if the amount in 2000 was too high, too low, or just right.  It's just based on available data; if we star...

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...