Higher Ed Data Stories

It's the end of summer, so this is a quick and easy visualization, showing enrollment in 2013 by institution on a map.  The data is provisional IPEDS data, so it's subject to some corrections, but the overall patterns won't change. It's probably obvious: Most colleges and universities are in populated areas, and so most college enrollment is too. But a few clicks can point out some interesting differences between and among the regions in the US.  Take a look at the first map, showing the US population. Every county in the country is colored from green (low) to red (high) populations. It should come as no surprise that most of the US Population lives on or in the east coast, the midwest, and the west coast. Now click on the tab at the top to to see where college students enroll, and you'll see a similar pattern: The orange and purple circles represent four-year public and private, not-for-profit institutions; the size of the circle is the relative enrollment. ...

Higher education is obsessed with prestige and institutions are always clamoring to find new ways to make it into the exclusive clubs in which they see their peers: Most selective, most applications,highest test scores, or  biggest capital campaigns, for instance. Has the top gotten bigger? I looked at IPEDS data from 2004 and 2013, and focused just on those whose numbers say are in the upper echelons of higher education, notwithstanding the limitations of IPEDS data. Use the tabs across the top to see the Tableau Story Points and see for yourself how the world has changed.The good news might be that if you're a student, there are more "elite" colleges these days; the bad news is that some of them are harder than ever to get into.  And that makes them happy. Learn About Tableau

My now-annual visualization of IPEDS admissions data is now up. This is always a popular post, for a lot of reasons: Counselors like to use it as a resource: journalists tell me it helps put things in perspective; and alumni rush to see how their school did last year (admit it, I know you do!) There are several tabs across the top to show test scores, admit rates, applications received, and other interesting data points. To get the most of it, you must interact, so click a filter to see only a region, or limit the view to schools of a certain size. You won't break anything. If you do, just click the little recycle button near the bottom to reset anything. IPEDS data is often wrong (more often at small schools with limited or no IR Staff) so take some of this with a grain of salt. And this always involves a lot of typing sans spell-check. If (when) you see something, let me know. Until then, enjoy. Learn About Tableau

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...