Higher Ed Data Stories

This is not a post about the diversity of American college students, but rather about the diversity of institutions. Recently, on a list discussion I subscribe to, someone made a point about non-selective or open institutions in the US: That there were many more of them than you might think.  So that got me thinking about our collective fascination with the most selective colleges and universities.  But even that visualization only looked at four-year, degree granting, freshman-enrolling institutions.  And of course, despite what popular culture might suggest, there are "many things in heaven and on earth that are not dreamt of in your philosophy." So, this: Just about all of the over 7,000 post-secondary educational institutions in the US, shown a couple of ways: Control (Public, Private not-for-profit, and Private, for-profit: Open- and non-open admissions policies; and bachelor's-awarding or not. Use the filters at right to select a subset, and you'll see how...

President Obama has framed a very specific goal for the United States: To increase the proportion of 25-to-34-year-olds who hold an associate degree or higher to 55 percent by the year 2025 in order to make America the leader in educational attainment in the world. It's also very ambitious: Just see for yourself.  This is data from the US Education Dashboard showing where we are as of a few years ago.  It uses PUMS Data of the American Community Survey, and averages the results over three years to reduce the standard error of measure. You can see how far we've come in three years by using the filter at the top right to toggle between 2005-2007 and 2007-2009.  These were, I'd remind you, very good years for higher education in the US. More important, you can see how far we have to go; the reference line is set to 55%.  And as a bonus, of course, you can compare states and different ethnic groups.  US Totals are indicated by the blue bar; states are in g...

There is a lot of data out there on college costs, but the story is not so easily seen. That's why I like this data set from the 2013 Digest of Education Statistics , Table 330.30 . It breaks tuition charges into percentiles by college or university control and further into two-year and four-year. Use the filters (in the blue boxes, at the top) to select Tuition and Fees only, or Tuition, Fees, Room, and Board (on the left); and institutional control and type (on the right). The top chart shows the charges, in nominal (not-adjusted for inflation) dollars. For your reference, inflation over the time period of 2000 to 2012 was 33 percent. You can see the labels at the end of the lines: Purple is 90th percentile, for instance, and the orange line shows the 25th. But toggling through the different types of colleges and universities can be less than insightful, other than seeing they've all increased pretty dramatically over time.  Look instead at the bottom chart, which ...

In some sense, using weighted averages to compare the US to the average value of any set of countries (especially when you don't include Russia, India, or China) is tautological; we're so big, we pull the average toward us by our mass.  Still, there is some interesting stuff here. This visualization shows the number per 100 of students who are at the typical bachelor's degree-earning age who actually received a degree in the year shown.  In other words, if the typical age to receive a BA in the tiny country of Karpathia is 23, and there were 100 students aged 23 in 2009, how many of them earned a degree? The visualization is sorted by 2011, but you can look at any year by hovering just to the right of the year label at the top of any column, and clicking the little icon that appears.  Clicking again will sort in reverse order, and clicking again will sort alphabetically. It also starts off showing the "Total" value, but you can choose just women or just men;...

Note: Functionality restored. A few posts back, I wrote about Enrollment by Institutional Type .  I've also taken a stab at Student Loans before, but find the federal data very hard to work with, as the types of loans rolled up into different categories is not consistent over time, thus leading to just flat-out-wrong conclusions about what's happening over time (note: In case it's not clear, that link leads to a visualization that proves how important it is to know your data; I didn't think those numbers could be right, and it turns out they weren't, but it was only apparent when I took a look at graduate loans, which were rolled up with undergraduate loans one year, but not the other.) Anyway, it's interesting to take a look at the world of federal student loans: Who gets them, the balance between and among the different programs, and how different institutions benefit from them. This visualization shows both macro- and micro- student loan data.  On t...

Everyone is--or perhaps should be--interested in how the state you live in thinks about public higher education pricing.  Even if you don't have a student in your family enrolled in a state institution, you probably pay taxes to support higher education; even if you don't pay taxes, you're probably interested in how your state develops educated citizenry who someday will. So it's very interesting to look at this data from the Digest of Education Statistics several different ways.  In order to get the most out of this visualization, you must interact, however, and there are only two ways to do so.  Both are very easy. First, use this control in the middle of the page: I promise you, you won't break anything.  With this control, you decide what value to show on the bars and to use to color the map (orange is low; purple is high).  It starts off with 2012 Resident Tuition and Fees for Public, four-year universities.  But choose anything: Non-resident...

There is a story in this data, but you can't see it yet.  You'll have to click your mouse to see it. But let's start with what is there: Total enrollment in degree-granting, public and private not-for-profit colleges and universities in the US from 1995 to 2012.  What you see is mostly stability, if you assume the whole world of higher education is made up of these two sectors only: Some growth in each in the top chart (the population has grown, of course, over that time); a relatively stable distribution of private and public enrollments (where private colleges have always enrolled about 20% of the students); and percentage changes since 1995 that are virtually identical. (Hover over the line at any point to get the details). Now, for the work: In the filter in the right, check the box labeled Private Not-for-profit, to add that population to the mix.  The blue line appears, and you begin to see its effect on the other two sectors: By 2012, the for-profit sector enro...

When freshmen students go to college outside their home state, where do they go? It's a question with lots of answers, and the insight is not always easy to figure out, let alone communicate. But I took a stab at it anyway. There are three views here, using the tabs across the top: If you want to know where students from a particular state enroll out-of-state, you should use the default view: When Freshmen Cross State Lines, Where Do They Go?   Pick any freshman home state (the view shows Michigan to start). You can also limit the colleges displayed by filtering on college region or Carnegie Classification. You can see that 372 freshmen left Michigan to go to The University of Toledo in 2012; 117 went to my institution, DePaul. Note that IPEDS data sometimes has mistakes (choose Arkansas, and you'll see one jump right out at you. ** See note below for an update. ) But overall, this data looks pretty clean. If you want to see which colleges enrolled students from specif...

We go through cycles in college admissions, it seems, and the topic of interest in recent days (at least based on my limited view on things) has to do with gender discrimination in college admissions. Most men readily admit that women are smarter, especially when it comes to high school performance. Others point out that men score higher on standardized tests, which predict far less with regard to college performance than grades do, and probably shouldn't carry as much weight as they do. The focus on the treatment of young men and women in college admission goes back at least as far as this article in the New York Times in 2006.  And the topic has been popping up a lot lately, most recently when Patrick O'Connor sent me this article , and asked for my opinion.  I thought it would be an interesting idea to look at the data.  So I did, using IPEDS data from the Fall of 2012. The story here is interesting: The thing that jumps out at you, or at least might jump out a...

A while ago, I found some interesting NCES data on teacher salaries over time Teacher Salaries ; it quickly became the most popular (currently 34,000 views) and the most contentious piece I'd ever posted, and months later, it's still getting hundreds of hits a week.  I simply found the data interesting, and wasn't making any sort of political statement.   I vowed at that time to never post about teachers again , so of course I'm breaking that rule today. This is from the 2011 Common Core of data, showing all personnel in each state who work in public primary and secondary education.  Click here to see the data table and read all the footnotes, especially if you want to argue. There are many things that can explain this data: States that have mostly urban areas (like California and New York) are likely to have bigger schools and classrooms, and thus fewer teachers per student.  Different states with similar populations may have more district administrators if they...

It's no surprise to readers of this blog how much college costs have risen over time.  It's also no secret what's happened to family income over that same period . How have colleges responded?  By dipping deeper into their own pockets, of course (and if you want to talk about the pain of healing self-inflicted wounds, go right ahead; I won't stop you.) This shows three things for each of about 1,500 private, four-year universities in the US: What percentage of students received institutional aid in 2006 (fat gray bar); what percentage received institutional aid in 2011 (thin red bar); and the delta over time (orange bar on right). You can use the filters to narrow down the list: Choose a region and/or a state.  (Note: Those two filters cascade: That is, if you choose "Great Lakes" you won't be able to select "Alabama" in the state section, for instance.) I've begun by limiting the view to colleges and universities of 2,500 full-time un...

This is an astonishing chart, just released today, April 1, 2014.  Can't get any fresher than that. The "Get a Life Institute" of Cambridge, Massachusetts has just conducted a one-year, longitudinal study of how much people need to get a life.  I've used a top flight data analysis, tool, Excel, to crunch the data and magically break it into age groups. 13,013 people were asked about their friends and work colleagues: Whether they ever talked about their SAT or ACT scores, their age, and how much the respondent thought that person should "Get a Life."  (That's what the Get a Life Foundation does, duh.) I think the results speak for themselves.  I have independently verified this data by speaking to a couple guys at Buffalo Wild Wings.  Statistically sound.