Higher Ed Data Stories

College enrollment is down.  Or maybe it's up.  Or maybe it's both. When you read headlines, you don't get a lot of nuance. And in a country as big as ours, with such an incredible diversity of programs and widely divergent institutions, nuance is important.  So this may help do the trick. This is enrollment data from about 6,600 post-secondary institutions in the US, and goes back as far as 1980.  It includes every institution, including those that grant degrees, and those that don't; four-year private, not-for-profits, for-profits, and publics; liberal arts colleges, research universities, and technical institutes.  All here. It's on two dashboards.  The first shows all undergraduate and graduate enrollment at all these institutions, since 1980.  (Note: The data skips from 1980 to 1984, and I took out two years of data--1998 and 1999--because they looked a little funky.) On the first dashboard, there are several controls to filter the data....

Each year NACUBO releases its study of endowment changes at about 800 colleges and universities in the US and Canada.  For this post, I'm including only those institutions in the US, and only those who reported two years of data to the survey, or about 787 institutions. Higher Education in the US, of course, is a classic story of the haves and have nots; a few institutions near the top of the endowment food chain have amassed enormous endowments, allowing them great freedom in the programs they offer and the students they enroll. In fact, the 21 most well endowed institutions control over half, or about $280B of the $560B held overall, leaving the other 766 to divvy up the remaining $280B among them; the top 93 own 75%. What's more interesting, I think, is the astonishing endowment growth: Stanford added $2.4B to its endowment in one year.  That amount is bigger than all but 38 of these institutions'  total 2017 value .  In other words, if the gain on Stanford's ...

If you read this blog regularly, you'll know I'm interested in the concept of the Draw Rate, a figure seldom used in college admissions.  Many people, when thinking about market position in higher education use selectivity or admit rate (the percentage of applicants admitted), or yield rate (the percentage of students offered admission who enroll) by themselves. But in the market of higher education, these two variables often fight against each other. (BTW, if you object to the use of the word "market" in higher education because you think it debases our profession, see what Zemsky , Wegner , and Massy have to say about that here .) Colleges, driven by market expectations, have for a long time tried to increase applications, believing that what the market wants is greater selectivity in the institution they choose, based on the Groucho Marx effect.  Except that in order to enroll the class you want, you have to take more students when apps go up (at least in the c...

This is perhaps the most popular, as well as my personal favorite, post, and I'm sad that I can only do it once every two years (as the IPEDS reporting cycle only requires this data be reported bi-annually.) This shows patterns of freshman migration within and outside of state boundaries. It's valuable to people because you can see the composition of freshman classes at colleges: Where do the students come from? You can also see patterns of state exports: Which states keep students at home, and which send them out-of-state (of course, the size and educational offerings of the various states means it's often unfair to compare, but it's still interesting.) For this, I've limited the universe to four-year, public and private, not-for-profit institutions. Community colleges and for-profit colleges tend to have very local enrollment patterns, and high numbers of part-time students. I've also taken out institutions whose primary focus is religious training, as w...

Seems like an easy question: There are 7,284 post-secondary options in the US. But everyone has a different definition of what they want when they ask for a count of colleges.  This should give you some clearer sense of the right answer for you. At top left is "The Answer," and that will not change as you navigate through this.  But you can use the controls here to change the number of colleges and universities you're looking at, and to change how they're broken out. Those controls change the number (in orange, at top) and the splits. For instance, at the far right, on the control labeled "Region, choose "Great Lakes," and you'll see that there are 1,079.  On the gray box at top right, choose "State" and you'll see 354 in Ohio.  Under "Control of Institution" choose "Public" and you'll get 266.  And so on.  Now break out by "Campus Location" and see most are located in cities. The reset butto...

My tireless crusade continues. Everywhere you look, it seems most of the discussion and ink spent on higher education focuses on the most selective institutions in America.  In addition, if you listen to parents and students and counselors talk, you'll learn that there is a perception that college is increasingly hard to get into. So, I broke the whole world of 1.403 four-year private, not-for-profit and public colleges and universities into bands, based on the absurd input measure of their freshman selectivity.  On the visualization below, they range from red (less than 15% admitted) to purple (over 60%) admitted. Each institution falls into one of these boxes. The four charts, clockwise from top left: The number of colleges in those categories, the number of freshmen they enroll, the total number of freshmen with a Pell grant, and the total undergraduate enrollment. If you think you see a lot of purple, you do.  And this is before anyone enforces any sort of s...

Fresh from IPEDS, just months after the wrap up of the 2017 admissions cycle, comes the 2016 admissions data. I've done something a little different this year to focus your attention, using five views of data, navigable via the tabs across the top of the visualization: Admissions data (first tab) is pretty clear.  Colleges display admit rates (overall, in red) and then admit rates by gender (men are in blue; women are in orange).  If the blue bar extends beyond the orange, you can see that the admit rate for men is higher, and vice versa. On the right are standardized test scores, showing calculated means.  In other words, since no one publishes averages and everyone wants them, I took the mid-point of the 25th and 75th percentiles to approximate the 50th percentile.  Note that IPEDS does not allow colleges that are test-optional to report test score information.  Also note that I've taken out a lot of colleges with extremely limited or suspect data. ...

Higher education is struggling these days, and there are a lot of solutions from a lot of pundits, all of which tend to be macro in nature: Delivery, cost structures, optimization, curricular adaptations, and many other ideas abound. On the micro level., however, the vast majority of the 1,700 or so private, four-year colleges and universities will point to "increasing our endowment" as one of the most crucial solutions to our internal institutional challenges. This is, in all probability, because the wealthiest institutions in the nation (in terms of endowment resources) are also the best known, and much of the brand of any institution is driven by wealth and reputation and prestige.  And even in this decade and these trying times, some of these institutions have parlayed considerable investment income into one-year operating surpluses of over a billion dollars. No, that's not a typo; it's a problem every university president would love to have. (Reminder to self...

Note: If you haven't read my post about the 2016 election results and educational attainment , it might be of interest to read that first.  Or later.  Or not at all. Your choice. This started simply enough: A couple of tables from the Digest of Education Statistics , (tables 302.65 and 302.70) showing the percentage of adults aged 18-24 who were attending a degree-granting college by state and ethnicity in 2005 and 2015.  If you've read this blog enough, you know I have a love/hate relationship with the digest: Great data, but horrible formatting.  The tables are made to be printed on a single 8" x 11" sheet and handed out.  The crucial distinction between data and insight is lost. Regardless, I reformatted the sheets into something workable for Tableau, and started to look at them. I wasn't having much luck: Some of the states didn't have data on African-American students, for instance, in 2005.  The variable for "Asian/Pacific Islander" was rel...

Strategic planning at universities is always an important process, but it's even more crucial to do correctly these days.  And lots of institutions might be missing a really critical element in scanning the external environment: The extent to which federal financial aid programs contribute to the essential revenue streams that run the enterprise. This is a fairly simple, if crowded, visualization, showing about 900 private colleges and universities who have good data in IPEDS.  Each dot is a bubble, colored by region, representing a single institution.  Its position along the horizontal axis shows student loans as percentage of core revenues, from left (low) to right (high).  I've included subsidized undergraduate direct loans, unsubsidized undergraduate direct loans, Parent PLUS loans, graduate subsidized, and Graduate PLUS loans in the calculation.  I did not include private loans. Some of these numbers may seem high, but understand what this says and what...

"You should write something about discount rates." I hear that a lot these days.  Even though NACUBO does its annual discount study , people still want and crave more.  There is no topic, it seems, as much on the minds of people in universities as discount rate. But despite my desire to make you, the loyal readers of this blog, happy, there are a lot of reasons I haven't written about discount rates: First, data are old.  It's a long story, but financial reporting (where you learn about financial aid) is reported about a year after the freshman class enrolls.  So the ability to calculate discount is always behind the most current admissions data.  The viz below is for 2014 freshmen for instance, and it's the most recent publicly available.  It's hard to describe to people how much things have changed between 2014 and 2017. (And even harder to figure out why 2016 admissions data are not out yet.) Second, discount is not as important as accounta...

I was doing some research for our own internal discussions, and decided to take it a few more steps to look at enrollment of undergraduate students by ethnicity at about 2,000 four-year, public and private institutions in the US.  (And when you look at the data and wonder why, rest assured, I checked: Miami Dade does offer Bachelor's degrees via online programs.) It's here, and the first two views are pretty easy to navigate:  Each chart shows a separate ethnicity and lists each institution in descending order.  The first view is by counts, and the second by percentages.  Thus you can see the institution that enrolls either the most Hispanic students, for instance, or the institution with the greatest percentage of Hispanic students, depending on your preference. If you'd like to focus on a single state, just public or private, or colleges of a certain size range, use the filters at the top.  You can always reset the views using the control at the bottom. ...