Higher Ed Data Stories

A while ago, I wrote about the wide range of institutions in the US post-secondary education system.  The point I was trying to make was that the prestigious, extraordinarily selective institutions you hear about all the time represent just the top of iceberg when it comes to colleges and universities in the US. That visualization counted institutions, for the most part. But another way to look at this is to show where students enroll, and I think this can be equally surprising, and, I hope a bit enlightening.  So take a look at this, again using Tableau Story Boards.  Each gray tab across the top shows the data presented in a different way; keep clicking from left to right to see the interesting tidbits this data reveals to us. Did you know, for instance, that one out of every eleven undergraduate college students in the US (excluding for-profits) enrolls at a California Community College?  Or that there are no private, not-for-profit colleges in Wyoming? Or ...

Note: The first version of this had a bug; I forgot to add the "Gender" filter to the final view, so everything was showing up at about 3 times the actual value.  It's fixed now, with a thanks to Tableau Zen Master Allan Walker of Utah State University  for catching it. While I was at it, I added a second view to show differences by gender. The last time I wrote about the salaries of educators , I said I'd never do it again: There were too many people who didn't know the difference between nominal and constant dollars ("No one made $75,000 in 1980!") and those who didn't understand averages ("How could the average in that state be $60,000? I only make $53,000!"). But this is interesting, I think in light of discussions about the rapid increase in tuition over time (in case you've been under a rock recently.)  It shows the changes in average (there's that word again) faculty salaries by rank since 1975, in either nominal or const...

A while ago, I used Tableau Software to visualize trends in High School Graduates provided by WICHE .  I think it was good, but with Tableau's new Story Points feature (in which you create pages of the story you want to tell) I think it's an even better story.  If you scroll through these points, you can get a sense of how America has become more diverse, and how those changes vary pretty dramatically by region.  That last point, especially, is often lost on people who talk about changing national demographics. Just like all politics is local , almost all enrollment is too. So, first, if you want, look at the old version , then take a look at the new visualization below.  What do you think? Learn About Tableau Learn About Tableau

In recent years, Colleges and Universities have turned their focus to International Enrollment as a source of new students. But is that a good idea?  It depends on what type of institution you are, apparently. This data comes from the Institute of International Education's Open Doors project, and while it's valuable, it still points out the problems with pre-aggregated data.  On the site, you'll find good stuff about students by enrollment level (graduate and undergraduate); you'll find good information about enrollment by institution; and you'll find information like this about enrollment by Carnegie Classification.  But you can only ask one question of each data set.  The result is that this information is intriguing, but not granular enough: For instance, what if I presumed that graduate students would naturally flock to doctoral and research institutions and a) I wanted to test that theory or b)I  just wanted to look at undergraduates to see where they wen...

If you only read the papers, you'd think US Higher Education consisted of a dozen or so high profile institutions.  But fortunately, there are "more things in heaven and in earth than are dream't of in their philosophy," with all appropriate apologies to Shakespeare. When I started this blog, it was in response to a new Tableau Software feature I had seen pre-viewed last September, called "Story Points."  In fact, the very title of the blog has a lot to do with that: Believing that data can and should be used to tell narratives that provide people with memorable insight. This is my first attempt to use Story Points to tell a story; one I hope sticks with people as we think about a pretty amazing selection of post-secondary options for students.  To navigate the story points, just use the grey boxes along the top, and a new chart or dashboard should point the way to insight. Learn About Tableau

Most everyone who knows anything about our Financial Aid system thinks it needs some improvement.  And almost everyone who actually goes through it, it seems, is astonished by the outcome: They expect me to pay how much for college? And that's just for one year? For those of you who don't know, all federal financial aid begins with the FAFSA , or Free Application for Federal Student Aid.  It's a form that collects information about income, assets, and family size in an attempt to estimate how much a family should be able to contribute to the cost of higher education.  Should being the operative word.  The figure it calculates--EFC, or Expected Family Contribution--is really a misnomer, sort of like the Peacekeeper Missile.  It's really just an index number designed to estimate federal expenditures on financial aid programs.  Many colleges find it so unreliable that they use another form, such as the College Board's Profile , or their own proprietary form ...

The previous post, about Doctoral Degrees by Program and Ethnicity, generated a followup question from Jennielle Strother at Seminary of the Southwest about similar data for undergraduate enrollment.  While I couldn't find that exact data, I did find this from the Digest of Education Statistics , showing degrees awarded by race and program, so I spent a half hour to pull it into a visualization. Some data visualization experts don't like tree maps because it's hard to make precise comparisons of area across distance, but I do like it for this purpose: You can pretty easily see the data in one view with minimal effort, and since precise comparisons aren't vital, you can get a good sense of the lay of the land. It's also very easy to ask your questions of this chart.  For instance, if you want to see how degrees shook out within a program (like engineering, or English)  you can quickly make those selections and see the results by ethnicity.  If you want to exclu...

A recent article in Inside Higher Education touched on a subject I've written a lot about on my other blog (the one with more words than pictures), specifically the role of standardized tests, in this case the GRE in selection of students for graduate programs.  The article cites another article in Nature blaming the dearth of minority and women doctoral graduates in science and engineering, at least in part, on the GRE . For anyone who is at least knee-deep in the debate about the value of standardized tests, the arguments are familiar ones: Too much emphasis on the tests means that too many candidates with strong potential are being overlooked, especially when you consider the predictive validity of the tests.  The authors are pretty blunt: " The GRE is a better indicator of sex and skin colour than of ability and ultimate success." So, in light of that, take a look at this data on 2012 Ph.D. recipients, which was downloaded from the NSF Survey of Earned Doctorat...

You have probably seen the headlines: College graduates make $800,000 more in the course of a lifetime than high school graduates do.  It's statistically correct.  And the conclusion it probably leads many people to is completely wrong. It's true, of course, as you'll see below, that income increases with every increment of education: A high school graduate earns more than someone who didn't graduate from high school; a person with a bachelor's degree earns more than someone with a high school diploma; and someone with a master's degree earns more than someone with just a bachelor's.  (This is not true for every person, of course, just for groups on average; Bill Gates, whom I'm pretty sure earns more than yours truly with a Master's Degree, never finished college.) But it's wrong to say that graduating from college is the cause of the income difference. It's true that earning a degree opens new doors to you, and new opportunities for in...

If you know much about higher education, you know that Massive Open Online Courses (known as MOOCs) are all the rage.  These courses are open to anyone, anywhere, for free, and promise opportunity for students who wish to learn on their own.  They are exciting in concept, and threaten to turn higher education on its head. So the recent release of HarvardX and MITX data on MOOCs is exciting.  The data is scrubbed to protect the privacy of the students who took the courses, but still yields a wealth of interesting stuff.  But you must interact. This dashboard starts with the intro, but has five views you can see by clicking across the tabs at the top. Once on a view, you can limit the data shown by (depending on the dashboard), by gender, education levels of students, home country, or institution, and whether the student registered or completed the course for a grade.  Data are shown by course, age, home country, and institution. Have fun, and let me know w...

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...