Higher Ed Data Stories

Yesterday's big news, of course, was the announcement of "The Coalition," the curiously-named group of about 80 colleges and universities making for very strange bedfellows.  I wrote a little bit about it here . Today I came across a little data set that contained information about Pell graduation rates and non-Pell graduation rates, and I thought it an interesting opportunity to look at it in light of yesterday's news.  So, over my lunch hour, I did (yes, this software is really that easy to use. You should try it out .) It's presented here in Tableau Story Points.  Just use the gray boxes across the top to look at the different views of the data.  Most of it should be self-explanatory, but if not, leave a comment and I'll reply to it. FYI, there were several schools from "The Coalition" who did not supply Pell Grant Grad Rate data. In alpha order, they are: Columbia (NY) Hamilton (NY) Harvard (MA) Rutgers (NJ) And you can ask them ...

Maybe  you're too young to remember the Ronald Reagan presidency, but one of the things I remember most is the " Peacekeeper Missile ." People were incensed by what they believed to be political doublespeak worthy of the book 1984 .  Missiles were objects of destruction, not something you associated with peace.  Change the language, change the discussion. So today, this happened.  In what Inside Higher Ed is calling " An Admissions Revolution ," eighty of the country's top colleges have formed a "Coalition," (a nice political sounding word: I mean, they form coalitions in Canada, so it must be nice, right?) to create a new application as well as a new portfolio system for students, who can start as early as the 9th grade, to assemble documents and other resources, not unlike my suggestion about Google managing the application process.  The goal, ostensibly, is to get more low-income and first generation students interested and ready to go to col...

On my train ride in this morning, I saw an article posted on Twitter about Pell Graduation rates at the 80 largest universities in America.  If you want to look at a boring table of static data, just click here . But I wanted to see if there were any patterns, so I copied the table, pasted it into Excel and then opened in Tableau to visualize it.  I think it tells an interesting story, although the data set is unfortunately limited, and with no key to merge the data with another set, it loses some potential. Start by looking at the first view.  For each institution, there are three columns: The overall six-year graduation rate; the six-year graduation rate of Pell recipients, and the spread, with the values on spread sorted from low to high.  In this instance, a negative number means Pell students graduate at a higher rate than the student body overall, and a positive number means just the opposite.  As you scroll down the list from top to bottom, ask yourse...

Women have made tremendous strides in educational attainment of bachelor's degrees in the last half of 20th century and the first decade of the 21st.  And even though doctoral degrees have lagged behind, we can see dramatic changes there as well. Take a look at this visualization using National Science Foundation Data  ( this link downloads the data for you in Excel  as Table 14).  What you see over time is a dramatic increase in the number of women who earned doctorates since 1983, but also a shift in the percentage distributions. Women are now the majority in Life Sciences, Education, and Social Sciences, and close to dead even with men in all fields except Physical Sciences and Engineering. The second view (using the tabs across the top) shows doctorate by broad discipline over time.  Use the filter at the top to compare men and women, or to see the totals.  Note the tremendous percentage growth in women in engineering since 1983: From 124 to 2,051,...

While waiting for 2014 IPEDS data to come out, I've been searching the web for more good educational data to visualize, and came across this site , where I found a nice little data set .  It's from 2010, and tracks 9th graders through high school and college. We typically think of looking at high school graduates and measuring how well they do, which is important, of course.  But you can have a high percentage of graduates enrolling in or graduating from college masking a problem of high school dropouts.  This data helps look at that. For all the data here, assume you start with 100 students in 9th grade in the state: What percentage of them graduate from high school? What percentage of them enter college? What percentage make it to the sophomore year of college? What percentage graduate from college within 150% of normal time (in other words, within six years)? Finally, there is another, more traditional measure included: The percentage of high school gradu...

Many people in higher education are fascinated with prestige, whether we like to admit it or not.  The question, "Where did you go to college?" can carry a lot of weight in job interviews or even casual conversation as people get acquainted. The National Science Foundation annually publishes data telling us the colleges that produce the most alumni who go on to earn a doctorate from a US institution in a given year.  It's not a great data set in itself, and some brave soul will take IPEDS degree data and merge it to show which of these institutions are the most efficient producer by discipline, but that's not what you'll find here. On this visualization, any time you see a college listed (UCLA, for instance), it shows how many bachelor's graduates of that institution earned a doctorate in 2012.  It's not the university that awarded the doctorate; that could be anywhere in the US (The University of Texas, or Stanford, for instance.) There is some inte...

The Federal Government released its Tuition Transparency Ratings today, to help students and parents find out how fast colleges are raising tuition and net price.  And as is the case with many well-meaning government programs, the data doesn't always tell you the whole story. The top chart on this visualization show tuition and fees at about 6,000 colleges and universities; the light blue bar is 2011, and the orange square is 2013.  To the right is the two-year percentage increase.  If you want to limit your selections or sort the colleges differently, take a look at this image, which I've embellished with some instructions.  Click to view larger. The second chart, at the bottom, shows net price for 2010 and 2011.  Net price is calculated after grant aid, which is only reported at the end of the year, which explains the delay.  It's pretty much the same: 2010 on the aqua bar, 2012 on the red dot, and percent change in the purple circle.  The f...

Most of the things I look at have to do with publicly available data sets, and that often means undergraduate admissions.  But while doing some investigation, I came across data from the American Association of Medical Colleges.  There's some interesting stuff there, and while it's formatted in a way that makes it really difficult to get to, it's worth a little work.  (I'm not convinced that the formatting isn't an attempt to keep less stubborn people from digging too deep on this; my request to get the data in a better format was ignored.) Best thing I learned: In 2014, of the 49,480 applicants to medical school, 41.1%, or 20,343, enrolled. That's a far higher percentage than I would have thought, although it is lower than the 2003 rate of 47.5% (34,791 and 16,541, respectively.)  It's clear, of course, that most medical school applicants are very well qualified, so that number represents the best of the best, but the perception of medical school selectiv...

A few posts ago, I wrote about where students of certain ethnicities went to college.  In other words, if you looked at all the Hispanic students in the US, we'd want to see where they go to college, and compare that to Asian students, or students of two or more races.  I asked whether a student's ethnicity determined where they go to college. This is the same data, but it examines it at the other end: The colleges, and how diverse they are.  In other words, does your location, control, and size, and Carnegie Type, for instance, determine how diverse you are, or limit how diverse you can become? Again, the answer is no, but you can find some interesting trends. If you're timid about using Tableau and interacting with it, here's your chance. First, choose an Ethnicity in the top left corner.  For instance, assume you want to display the percentage of enrollment that is Asian. Then, choose what value you want to display along the y-axis (the left side, from ...

Note:  I got an email from Dean Kilgore at Mount Saint Mary's in California, who indicated I'd downloaded data for the wrong Mount Saint Mary College:In this case, the one in New York. I had to create the list manually, and it was just a slip on my part. Sorry about that. I've removed them from the analysis, but unfortunately, can't add the correct one at this time without a considerable amount of work. Sweet Briar College in Virginia recently announced, to the shock of many in higher education, that it would be closing at the end of this spring, 2015 term .  As often happens when a college decides to close, those who are or were close to it rally the troops and wage a fierce campaign to try to keep it open.  Sometimes it works, other times, it doesn't. The scene playing out is not unusual: Allegations of secret deals, incompetence, blindness to all that is and was good at Sweet Briar. This is what happens when you decide to close a college.  And although I...

The answer to the headline, of course, is "no."  Race is not determinant of where you go to college, but race--or more probably the factors that vary with race and ethnicity--may influence your college choice set, which can, of course, influence where you go to college. I've written before about how all these variables are at play with each other: In America, race, income, parental attainment, and presumably, opportunity, all cluster together. And, after you look at this, you'll see how opportunity gets distributed by race, provided you're willing to click a button or two.  The visualization starts off showing all undergraduate enrollment in almost 7,000 post-secondary institutions who report to IPEDS.  (And before you object, I've believe strongly that the college you attend is not your destiny, and that education is what you make of it, as I've written before on my other blog . But it's also clear that many people believe talent congregates at th...

Is it true that the rich get richer, as suggested by a recent Washington Post article discussing college endowments?  Probably. But what's more interesting is the pecking order in the world of endowments, and how it's changed (or not) over the last decade or so.  I downloaded trend data from IPEDS showing beginning of year endowment by fiscal year for about 160 four-year private institutions with enrollments of at least 5,000.  To be sure, there are some very well endowed colleges who have smaller enrollments (Williams, Pomona, Grinnell, etc.) but this chart could get messy pretty fast. I pulled the data into Tableau and created a bump chart, showing not the value over time (because everyone does that) but rather the rank of all the endowments shown.  So, for instance, if a line slopes down, it might mean a college has gone from 10th to 20; a slope up might show the opposite. But what we see here are lines that are essentially flat.  There are a couple an...