Higher Ed Data Stories

While the endowment of a private university is not a big investment pot from which universities draw income to spend at their discretion (some portion of every endowment is restricted to certain use), it's a very good proxy for institutional wealth.  What's always been interesting is the enormous size of the top five or six institutions, always led by Harvard, in comparison to everyone else.  And yet Princeton, which enrolls fewer students, has the largest per-FTE endowment. This visualization shows two things.  On the top chart, it's a tree map, or what I like to call a sheet cake map.  Think of all the money in all the endowments as one big bowl of batter baked into a cake, and then, once baked, sliced up into pieces.  The size of the piece is that institution's endowment as a part of the whole. The bottom chart shows ten years of endowments, measured at the start of the fiscal year shown, so you can see the hits in 2008--2009 and the overall growth over t...

I love the Internet.  Thirty years ago, I couldn't have imagined being able to look up several years of tax returns for the Ivy League Colleges and Universities (let alone being interested in them.)  But Guidestar (a great site you should check out, in case you don't know it) comes to the rescue.  The documents are pdf, unfortunately, but you learn a lot by inputting the data manually into a spreadsheet. For your information: By law, all universities that receive Title IV funding must make tax returns available to the public, so there is nothing clandestine about this. The tax returns can show you, albeit at a very high level, at how the Ivy League Institutions generate revenue, and how they spend it. To no one's surprise, salaries and benefits dominate at almost all colleges and universities, and if you're really curious, the returns list in detail how much the officers and highest paid non-officers make. But as I once suggested , the most interesting thing is th...

Unless you live under a rock, you probably know that colleges are, in general, interested in increasing the number of students who apply for admission.  There are a couple reasons for this, but they're all mostly based on the way things used to be: That is, before colleges started trying to intentionally increase applications.  The good old days, some might say. In general, increasing applications used to mean a) you could select better students, who would be easier to teach, and who might reflect well on your college, or b) you as an admissions director could sleep a little better, because you were more certain you could fill the class, or c) your admission rate would go down, which is generally considered a sign of prestige.  After all, the best colleges have low admission rates, right? Well, yes, one does have to admit that the colleges that spring to mind when one says "excellent" all tend to have low admission rates.  Lots of people want to go there, and thu...

Frankly, the data are a little boring when you first try to visualize them.  When you're looking at the number of degrees awarded by discipline and by state, California, Texas, and New York win pretty much everything.  That's no surprise, of course, as they're the largest states with the most college students. So I broke it into regions, thinking there must be some differences in the degrees awarded in different parts of the country.  Nope.  The Middle Atlantic wins.  That's where the people are. Finally, I looked at each state by the percentage of degrees in certain fields, and voila! Something interesting. Different states award different types of degrees in dramatically different proportions. Some of this can be answered easily: A high percentage of business and computer science degrees in Arizona is driven by the University of Phoenix, but others are not so obvious. Why is there such disparity when you look at humanities, engineering, or health professi...

There are a lot of bad infographics floating around the Internet.  When they concern things like the difference between cats and dogs, or how many hot dogs and hamburgers Americans eat over the 4th of July, it's no big deal. But this blog is about higher education data, and when I see bad infographics on that topic, I feel compelled to respond.  This one is so bad it's almost in the "I can't even," category.  It takes very interesting and compelling data--The graduation rates of Black male athletes--and compares it to overall graduation rates at several big football schools in the nation.  Here it is: For starters, this chart appears to stack bars when they shouldn't be stacked: A graduation rate of 40% for one group and 40% for another group shouldn't add up to 80%.  The effect is that it distorts much of what your brain tries to figure out.  For instance, look at the overall rates (longer bars) for Georgia Tech and Pittsburgh;  Georgia Tech ...

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have time. --Pascal And sometimes it's that way with data visualization, too.  What starts out as a simple project--one you think will take a few minutes--gets slightly more complicated.  This morning, I came across this interesting Chronicle of Higher Education story , showing Pell Institute Data on Economic Diversity. If you don't want to look at the article, here is a screen grab of the chart.  Click on it to enlarge. It's not a bad chart, but I found myself taking more time than I thought I should to figure out the story, which is that for-profit institutions enroll far higher percentages of low-income students than public institutions.  (Another problem with this that I can't fix is that the data are not complete; for instance, there is no data on private Baccalaureate or Master's Institutions included in the set.) Additionally, notice the subtle changes in color when you move from the overall cat...

Last night, I gave a little demo of Tableau Software to graduate class, and tried to make the point that big, long, detailed spreadsheet reports are like a teenage daughter: The information you get sometimes seems like it's only given to meet the minimum requirement of reporting, not to allow you to extract any insight. This seems to be true with the people at NACUBO, too, who each year release a study of endowment values and one-year performance .  I'd encourage you to click on that link to see exactly what they provide.  Not only is the document lacking any insight about trends of the shape of the market, it's boring.  Most people will look at the top 15 or 20, and then go down the list to find institutions they know and make some comparisons. Extracting the data is difficult, and even when you do, it's laden with characters that should be stripped off or cleaned up due to footnotes and other caveats. Moreover, there is no ID number attached to the colleges (like ...

I've worked at a wide range of colleges and universities in my career: From a tiny little college with lots of adults and transfers and commuters, to a classic liberal arts college, to one of the country's best known and wealthiest colleges, to a place just coming out of financial exigency, to one of the largest private universities in the country.  Money, in case you didn't know, makes a difference. At one of those places, I was docked 18 cents on my first expense report reimbursement, because I had rounded up a tip, making it more than the 15% allowed by college policy.  But it was at one of the most heavily endowed colleges in the nation, at least on a per student basis.  I remember telling this to my mother, who only remarked, "Well, I guess now you know how they got it." So today's Chronicle of Higher Education article about the " Huge Explosion of Wealth " and the resultant $37.5 Billion in contributions to colleges and universities last ye...

This is a quick and easy little visualization to digest, I hope. Using IPEDS data, I wanted to look at which colleges graduated the most and the highest percentage students of color.  So here it is. Use the blue control boxes at right to choose a State, Carnegie Classification(s) and Control, whether public, private, and/or for-profit.  You can use the sliders if you want to look at schools with a certain size range, or only schools that award a certain percentage of degrees to students of color.  The bars are color coded by control. The left hand column is fixed to show total Bachelor's degrees awarded in 2013.  Use the top right box to control what displays in the center and right-hand column, for instance Asian students, or Hispanic Students, or, the default, All Underrepresented Students of Color (Hispanic, African-American, Pacific Islander, Native American, and Two or More Races.)  The center column shows the number; the right hand column divides the...

Note: Tableau Guru Jeffrey Shaffer suggested I change from a red/green palette to one that's better for people who cannot distinguish between those two colors.  I changed it to include one view with orange/purple, but kept the original as well. My undergraduate degree is in English Literature, and so I've read a lot of things I didn't like. In one American literature class I remember, the two heavyweights of the course were William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, and the difference in their literary styles made an impression on me.  I'm reminder of this exchange of criticisms: Faulkner: "Hemingway has never been known to use a word that might send the reader to a dictionary." Hemingway: "Poor Faulkner.  Does he really think big emotions come from big words?" And so it goes with Story Telling With Data.  I downloaded an interesting data table from the Digest of Education Statistics , and worked for a long time, trying to find some interest...

One of the more popular and interesting (IMHO) posts on this blog was the one on freshman migration.  It's interesting to see, I think, where colleges and universities draw their freshman from. Normally, I think it's best to start at a high level and drill down, but this time, I'm going in reverse. This is a much higher-level view of the data, by state, and it includes only recent high school graduates who go to a four-year college (you might call them traditional freshmen, even though they're actually in the minority .)  But there is still a lot of interesting stuff here, I think. You've seen how to manipulate a Tableau visualization (or if you haven't click here ), so use those skills to see how many interesting tidbits you can find in this visualization.  Hover over the top or bottom of the column to sort the column, using the little icons there.  Here's a factoid to start: The percentage of freshmen who stay in state is the highest in Utah. What e...

It's the kind of headline that grabs attention: Catholic colleges tell poor students: Go somewhere else.   And it certainly generated some discussion on Twitter and within my own university.  The article was written by Paul Moses, who is a Journalism Professor at Brooklyn College, and who seems to have a strong interest in social justice and Catholic topics, based on his tweets . When you work at a Catholic college or university, service to the poor is something you talk about all the time.  At my own institution, where about 28% of freshmen receive the Pell Grant, we pride ourselves that the commitment is in our mission statement.  So I thought the topic deserved something more than the one-dimensional, high-level examination the article offered. I went to IPEDS and downloaded some data, which is presented here.  To start with, I've included only private institutions, filtering to those with admission rates below 70%, as these institutions have some flexibi...