Higher Ed Data Stories

This is a good example, I think, of how data visualization helps you make sense of things: Even simple things like a small table of data. In this case, the table is from The College Board, showing changes in the percentage of in-state freshmen in our nation's public universities.  You can see the raw data by downloading Table 28, here . What you can't see by looking at that table, of course, is the overall pattern.  That's where a picture comes in. T here are only tw o numeric values in the table: Percentage of freshman enrollment that are state residents in 2002 and 2012.  I added a third, by subtracting one from the other.  Then I put them on a   choropleth hex map, a format I like because all the states are the same size.  On this map, orange colors show states where the percentage of in-state residents has increased; purple shows a decrease, and grays are mostly even. Be careful about  interpreting  this data. This  visualization ...

Note: I tweeted a link that was set up for mobile, and thus the visualization scrunched down to almost nothing.  If the URL has m=1 at the end, just delete it, or click on the title above to go to the desktop/iPad version. The College Board just published long-awaited concordance tables to compare new SAT scores to old, and new SAT scores to ACT. You can download the data here if you wish , or look at them visually below.  The tables in the data correspond to the tables on the visualization (that is, for instance, that Table 7 in the College Board worksheet can be viewed on Dashboard 7 here, using the tabs across the top.) For convenience, Old SAT scores are always in light gray.  Notice also I've labeled the chart when the axes are not synchronized. As this data is public, I have cited the original source, its purpose is educational, and this blog is not monetized, I believe the use of it in this format falls under Fair Use . As always, hover over the dots for ...

There has been a considerable amount of discussion in the admissions world about The Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success .  I remain skeptical about the motives behind this, as I did when I wrote this in the Washington Post .  To be clear, however, I believe colleges have the right to create their own admissions platform and conduct the business side of higher education with great latitude. I am merely questioning how a fractured admissions process helps low income students find, apply, get admitted to, and enroll in college; and the use of the term "access" by colleges who have, in general, poor records of providing access to low-income students. Many school counselors I've talked to are very concerned by what they perceive to be a dearth of information about how this all will work, and there are also lingering concerns about privacy, which have not yet been publicly answered (to the best of my knowledge), even though one component of the application platf...

You hear a lot about enrollment of international students these days, and often, I think, when a subject gets a lot of play, it tends to be overhyped, often by people who don't really understand the data. This would not be one of those times. I used IPEDS trend analysis to look at enrollment of non-resident students (that is, students who are neither US citizens nor permanent residents) over time.  For comparison's sake, I also looked at overall enrollment over that same time. This data set includes all 7,276 post-secondary institutions in the US, both degree-granting and non-degree-granting, whether or not they participate in Title IV programs, so my usual advice about IPEDS data is amplified a bit here.  Still, the trends are interesting. The blue charts (on left) show total enrollment at these institutions: Bars show numbers, and the line shows percent change since Fall, 2004.  The red charts (right) show estimated international enrollment.  It's estimated...

The world is shrinking, if not literally, then metaphorically.  Some colleges and universities embrace this in big ways, and this is the purpose of this visualization. The Institute of International Education puts out good data on both international enrollment at US colleges and enrollment of US students in study abroad programs.  I've combined that data into two views that show both. The top chart contains two sort-able and filterable bar charts.  It starts out sorted from large to small on the left column, namely study abroad students in 2014-2015; if you'd rather sort by total international enrollment, hover over that x-axis until the small icon pops up and click that.  Reset by using the button at lower left. The bottom charts shows every college in the data set, with study abroad on the x-axis and international enrollment on the y-axis.  Each dot is a college, color coded by control. As always, if you want to look at a smaller set of colleges, use t...

I normally focus on Higher Education data on this blog, and in fact, this visualization started out as a higher education post: I wanted to look at presidential election results from 2012 to see if education played a part in how people voted.  But since I had a large census file anyway, with lots of interesting information like income, ethnic groups, and other data, I decided to take it one step farther.  OK, may steps farther.  And to me, almost everything is ultimately about education. If you don't like to interact with these visualizations, stop right now.  You'll have to play with this to see how it works. On the top view, you see every county as a dot, color-coded by region, and arranged on a grid.  Hover over any dot for details, if you'd like.  Counties voting more heavily for Obama are on the right; Romney counties are on the left.  Wealthier counties are on top (higher median family income), and poorer are at the bottom.  Note the ref...

In eighth grade, a teacher introduced my class to the Statistical Abstract of the United States , and it changed the way I looked at numbers and information.  Of course, in those days, it was just a book, and very hard to interact with.  But I still remember poring over it, absorbing interesting, if arcane, facts about the country and its regions.  Ever since, I've been fascinated with reference books like it. Then, sometime about 2005, I came across the Census Atlas of the United States , and my mind was blown even more.  It contains page after page of maps, representing gobs of data, visualized in a way that tells stories, sometimes with a single picture.  One map, especially, made an impression on me. It's in this chapter, page 14 of the chapter, page 40 of the book , showing Prevalent Asian Group, by county.  If you can't download that large .pdf file, it's below: In my job, and in higher education in general, we think about race and ethni...

In case the coverage of the 2016 presidential election didn't convince you, this might help you see why people in the rest of the country seem different somehow. The data are from the US Census Bureau's American Community Survey, in 2012; this shows the educational attainment of adults 25-34 in that year.  Use the control at top right to pick a value to display on the map, and the states (represented by hex boxes here) change color to show the value you've chosen.  The bar chart also updates. There are seven values: Less than a HS Diploma shows the percentage of the population in that state aged 25-34 that did not complete high school HS Diploma or Less shows the number above plus the percentage of people who have just a high school diploma Exactly a HS Diploma shows just that: Everyone who graduated from high school but did not continue HS Diploma or Higher is the percentage with at least a high school diploma, including everyone who went beyond that Bachel...

This is the second part of my visualization of graduation rates from NCES. Part I is right below this one, or if  you want, you can click here to open it in a new window. People in higher ed, and especially in government, talk a lot about graduation rates, and the presumption is this: That graduation rates are something we credit or blame on the colleges; that is, something a particular college does determines whether or not its graduation rate is high.  If Princeton stopped caring, presumably, its graduation rate would collapse. Well, maybe.  Probably not, though. We can see that a single factor, such as percentage of students in the freshman class with Pell, or the mean SAT score, can predict with some precision the graduation rate of a college or university.  If you don't believe me, see for yourself . There is some variation in rates of colleges with similar profiles, of course, and people believe--correctly, or incorrectly, I'm not sure--that this is t...

I like the NCES Digest of Education Statistics, but some of the reports they present are almost unusable.  If you've ever tried to visualize a report like this , you know what I mean.  If anyone from NCES is reading this, please help and encourage the good people there to put data in a cleaned, unformatted report. But, on to the data.  This is pretty simple, actually, and it bounces off previous visualizations I've done that show graduation rates are as much an input as an output .  The data are presented in three views: Over time, summarized for a single year, and by institutional type.  Click on the tabs to see them all, and use the filters on the right to select subsets.  You may want to look at women, or Hispanic students, for instance, and you can do so here. There are some interesting patterns here.  It's clear that women, across the board, have higher graduation rates than men; and that colleges are not serving African American men very well...

A recent article in the Washington Post piqued my interest: Why the University of Oregon turned to neighboring states for students , by colleague Roger Thompson. Some of this is no surprise, of course. I've been looking at NCES and WICHE data for years, and even visualized the latter to show how demographics will change enrollment profiles at colleges across the country. Lots of publics realize this, and lots have attempted to enroll larger numbers and percentages of students from outside their states. There's more to it than population, however: It's one of education's worst-kept secrets that students who travel farther to college come from families with higher incomes (or vice versa, of course), and in general, so do students who cross state lines for their education. Public universities have discovered that high out-of-state tuition makes them less desirable, and so have recently adopted a revenue maximization model, often offering large discounts to non-resid...

This is three years of data from the NCES Digest of Education Statistics, breaking out all bachelor's degrees awarded by ethnicity, gender, and discipline.  For the sake of clarity, I rolled many of the disciplines together, and on at least one view, rolled up ethnicities into groups as well. The first view simply takes a look at ethnicity and gender: What do Asian women, or Hispanic men study in college?  Eight views on one dashboard, showing some interesting stuff: 30% of Asian women study Science and Math, compared to just 9.5% of African American men.  Business always dominates with men, except Hispanic men.  Interesting. Behold the power of DataViz.  This view is the exact same day, just shown a different way to allow you to get a comparative view.  This shows all ethnic groups in the data set, however, and the data in columns adds up to 100%.  So, for instance, in the very top left, of all degrees awarded to Asian women, 19.82% were ...