Higher Ed Data Stories

The Pell Grant got its start as the Basic Education Opportunity Grant, or BEOG sometime in the 1970's; it was later named for Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell.  The idea was simple: To provide a basic level of financial support for students from low income families who aspired to go to college. It's almost certainly had a lot to do with increased levels of educational attainment in America, but rapid tuition increases, coupled with lower increases for the Pell, means the gap between Pell and tuition has gotten bigger over time. The College Board has complied a lot of good data on this and other financial aid trends in its report, updated annually, on its Higher Education Trends site, where you can download the data . Unfortunately, the data looks like this when you get it.  Maybe you can extract the insight; I can't. So I pulled it into Tableau and spent an hour or so with it to see what I could find.  It's below.  The College Board has calculate...

College tuition is a hot topic these days, in case you've not noticed.  But often, the stories focus on a national perspective: Tuition is up a gazillion percent in ten years, for instance, or average tuition increases last year were 4.9%.  Sometimes, big states like California get attention because there are so many students affected by tuition increases (and because 9% of all college students in the US are in California Community Colleges .) So I took data from the College Board , and looked at it four different ways, to show how the story changes depending on where you live.  Each of these four views requires you to choose a type of institution (public four-year, public two-year, or private not-for-profit), and to choose whether you want to look at inflation adjusted tuition or nominal (non adjusted).  I recommend inflation-adjusted (unless you're interested in nostalgia) because it gives you a better sense of how much tuition has increased. One view (at the bot...

I've just finished writing an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education (which is why I haven't posted in a while) talking about our first-generation, low-income student challenge.  This chart didn't make the final cut because the article has a lot of charts, and I tried to keep them simple.  But I do think it's instructive. Each dot represents an institution; you can hover over the dot to see details.  They're colored by freshman selectivity (red dots mean institutions with a freshman admission rate of under 15%, using 2012 IPEDS data, and green is admit rates between 50% and 75%, for instance.)  They are arrayed on two scales: Endowment assets per FTE student enrollment (high to low, from top to bottom) and the Full-pay/Pell Spread. To calculate the Full-pay/Pell Spread, you simply subtract the percentage of undergraduates with Pell Grants from the percentage of all students who receive no institutional aid (also know as full-pay students.)  Institutions...

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) provides a lot of snapshot reports of national education data, but it also produces projections of educational statistics out ten years that can prove useful.  Unfortunately, they're always a couple years behind the curve, so this is from the 2012 report (the 2013 report is out, but only available in pdf format.) It tells an interesting story of college enrollment that can be helpful as we look into the future.  By 2021, overall enrollment will increase with the US population; it will still be mostly Caucasian students, although that majority will have shrunk; and Hispanics will have overtaken African-Americans as the second largest ethnic group. If your institution isn't thinking about the future, and especially if your administration is still dominated by people who went to college in the 1960's and 1970's, you should show them this. Is this a case of everything changing?  Or everything staying the same?  Le...

This is a great example of how Data Visualization helps tell a story. First, take a look at this table of data and tell me what you see.  I know, right?  Not much stands out of a table of black numbers on a white canvas. Now look below.  It's pretty much the same data (I did not display SME), but it shows you a pattern you see instantly.  This is the percent of people by age who are enrolled in any school, from pre-school to graduate programs.  On the first view, you see the pattern by age group; each line is a gender/ethnic group (white females, Hispanic males, etc.)  Right away, the story jumps out at you.  In very early years, white students are enrolled at greater rates.  From ages 6-15, things even out, then they split again. (Causality, coincidence, or co-variance with data you don't see?) The view starts with 1995, but use the slider in the top right corner to scroll through the years.  When you do, you'll see the consistency ov...

Here's some more interesting information from the IIE Open Doors Project, but this is not about where US students study overseas, but where students from overseas enroll in the US.  This is pretty simple, actually. Each dot on the map represents a college or university (hover over for details).  The size of the dot represents the International Student population in 2012, and the color represents the percentage of enrollment at that college or university that is international (that is, on a J-1 or F-1 Visa, presumably; permanent residents are not considered international students.)  The bar charts below show every IHE with both the number of international students (right column) and percentage of all enrollment that is international (on the left.) You can use the filters to narrow down the IHEs displayed, by choosing the number of international students, the percent international, or the percent of all enrollment that is international.  And you can sort the bar ch...

Lots of US college students study abroad, and the IIE Open Doors Project has great data about where they go; if you're a member, they graciously make even more detailed data about what colleges and universities they attend. So I took that data and rolled it (from 2012) into my IPEDS data set (from 2013) to see what jumped out at me.  On this visualization, you can sort the top chart several ways to see who comes to the top of the list: Alphabetically, by the number of students studying abroad, by the percent of all enrollment or the percent of undergraduate enrollment.  Just hover over the top of that column until the small icon pops up, and click on it.  It will sort ascending, descending, and alphabetically with subsequent clicks. Note, I've taken a few institutions out because they are mostly graduate and thus have undergrad/study abroad percentages off the charts. The bottom chart is more interesting, I think, for the pattern it shows: For public institutions, a...

As we continue the push to enroll and graduate more students from colleges, it's interesting to look back at trends in degrees awarded, at the Bachelor's, Master's, and Doctoral levels over time.  So, I downloaded data from the Digest of Education Statistics and came up with this. At the very top level, we see that the number of degrees awarded has increased dramatically since 1970, although of course so has the population: It's up about 51% since 1970, while degrees awarded increased 138%, while bachelor's degrees increased just 113%.  You can't say after looking at those statistics, however, whether we've been successful or not; along with the increase in population comes shifts in age distributions, as well as ethnicity and wealth, all of which affect the likelihood of going to college. Still, the interesting stuff comes as you scroll across the gray boxes on the top, and drill down by academic discipline: Decreases in English and Education, and incr...

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 ...