Higher Ed Data Stories

This is always a popular post, it seems, and I've had a couple of people already ask when it was going to be out.  Wait no more. This is IPEDS 2018 admissions data, visualized for you in two different ways.  You can switch using the tabs across the top. The first view is the universe of colleges and universities that report data; not every college is required to, and a few leave data out, and test optional colleges are not supposed to report test scores.  But IPEDS is not perfect, so if you find any problems, contact the college. On the first view, you'll see 1,359 four-year private and public, not-for-profit institutions displayed.  In order to make this as clean as possible, I've taken out some specialty schools (nursing, business, engineering, etc.) as many of those don't have complete data.  But you can put them back in using the filter at top right. Hover over any bar, and a little chart pops up showing undergraduate enrollment by ethnicity. You c...

Note: A few people have pointed out that some data on this appears to be slightly askew, even though the story is mostly unchanged.  So don't cite it. Don't look at the viz yet.  Wait until I tell you. This is an update to a post I did about five years ago , showing the growth in educational attainment in the US over time. I thought then, and I still think, it's among the most jaw-dropping visualizations I've done, not, of course, for the visualization skills, but for the story it tells, and perhaps, the future it holds for us. This is from Table A-1 on this page of the Census Bureau. First, before you dive into it, take a guess about the percentage of adults in the US, aged 35-54 with a bachelor's degree or higher.  Got a guess?  If  you have a college degree, you probably said something like fifty or sixty percent, based on my sampling of twenty people or so.  If you didn't, your guess is probably much lower, usually ten or fifteen percent.  T...

This will probably be the final post in Higher Ed Data Stories for a while.  As you may already know, I'm leaving DePaul for the "best coast" to take the position of Vice Provost of Enrollment at Oregon State University , effective July 1.  Thus, I'll be in personal and professional transition for a while, and once I arrive, I'll be busy learning a new institution and working on new challenges that should keep me occupied for a while. (Additionally, I'm not sure what my Tableau situation will be like...) As you may already know, HEDS got its start when I decided to revise and share work I was already doing in my job at DePaul . Much of it, I presumed, would be of interest to university colleagues and high school and independent counselors.  But I had no idea how many people craved information like this. So, for now, here is information about bachelor's degrees earned in 2011, 2014, and 2017, the most recent available in the I PEDS data center .  It...

If you want to strike fear into the hearts of enrollment managers everywhere, just say, "The trustees want to talk about the discount rate." If you don't know, the discount rate is a simple calculation: Institutional financial aid as a percentage of tuition (or tuition and fees) revenue.  If your university billed $100 million in tuition and fees, and awarded $45 million in aid, your discount is 45%.  In that instance, you'd have $55 million in hard cash to run the organization. Discount used to be a reporting function, something you would look at when the year was over to see where you stood.  Now, it's become a management target. And that's a problem.  If you want to know why, read this quick little explanation of Campbell's Law . The short explanation is this: If you want to lower discount--if that's really the thing you are after--you can do it very easily.  Just shrink your enrollment.  Or lower your quality, as measured by things like GPA and...

If you are at all interested in college admissions, you are perhaps already sick of the coverage of the Varsity Blues Scandal, in which some parents allegedly conspired to break the law to get unfair advantages for their children in the admissions process. Almost no one thinks this behavior is appropriate.  Almost no one . There have been calls for reform in college admissions, and it's clear that this scandal has exposed some weak spots in the process. At some institutions.  OK, a handful of institutions.  If you had your thumb removed. And even then, it's a coach or two at those institutions who gave into greed and decided to take the money in exchange for a greased path to admission and a fake spot on the team for these students, some of whom apparently had no idea about the machinations behind the scenes on their behalf. Admittedly, as we get deeper into discovery on this, we may find that the cheating on the SAT and ACT scandal goes far deeper than we would...

Several years ago, The College Board produced a study of "discrepant performance," after studying about 150,000 students and their freshman-year grades in college.  If you want to see the study, you can get a pdf of it here . The title, of course, is interesting. (And before we get too deep, it's important to note that these are old SAT scores, in case you think the new test is better and want to argue that point, nice tight concordance between the old and the new notwithstanding.) Discrepant performance is defined as standardized test scores that are inconsistent with a student's academic performance in high school.  The distributions of scores and grades were normalized, and then each student's z-score on tests was compared to their z-score on grades.  Just under two-thirds of students had scores and grades that were consistent, and we don't need to talk too much more about them. The most interesting thing is the other one third of students: Those whose ...

Much has been made recently of the attempts by colleges to increase the enrollment of Pell-eligible students.  For those who don't know, the Pell Grant is the federal grant awarded to students with the highest financial need.  In fact, the pressure may be backfiring , in a classic case of Campbell's law . Regardless, given the state of federal reporting requirements (why can't the FISAP be in IPEDS??), this blunt tool is still the best one we have widely available to help take stock of the economic diversity of enrolling students. So this is where we are. This morning, Robert Kelchen sent this tweet about the data he uses to measure grad rate gaps between Pell and Non-Pell recipients.  I asked him for it, and he graciously shared it right away.  I spent 30 minutes to visualize it (for our own internal use, mostly), and made it better for others who might want to take a look. On the first view, four data points are displayed: The college's grad rate for Pell...

This data has long been of interest to high school counselors, and of course, I decided to update it at the worst possible time: During the recent shutdown of the federal government.  I found the NSF website shuttered. Fortunately, the Polar Vortex gave almost everyone in Chicago a two-day break shorty after the government re-opened, and there was not much to do with the windchill approaching -60 °  F; but the government had re-opened, and the data were available.  So here you go. There are two simple views of doctoral education here: The first is the undergraduate institution of doctoral recipients from 2013 to 2017.  You can use the controls at the top to limit your view to public or private; Carnegie type; State, or HBCU status.  If you want to, you can also focus on a single year or range of years using the sliders. For instance, if you wanted to look at how many graduates of Baccalaureate institutions in California received a doctorate in chemistry in...

When designing a data visualization, the first thing to ask is, "What does the viewer want to see, or need to know?"  If you're designing a dashboard for a CFO or a CEO or a VP for Marketing, those things are pretty straight forward: You're designing for one person and you have a pretty good idea what that person wants. But in higher education, we want to look at segments of the industry, and trends that are specific to our sector.  And there are thousands of you (if this blog post is average, that is).  So I can't know. This visualization of enrollment data measures only one thing: Enrollment.  But it measures several different types of enrollment (full-time, part-time, graduate, and undergraduate, in combination) at many different types of institutions (doctoral, baccalaureate, public, private, etc.)  And the best thing is that you can make it yours with a few clicks. The top chart shows total headcount, and the bottom shows percentage change since the f...

This is pretty interesting, I think, mostly for the patterns you don't see. This is data on medical school admission in the US; some of it is compiled for a single year, and some for two years (which is OK because this data appears to be pretty stable over time.) Tab 1 is not interactive, but does show applications, admits, and admit data on grids defined by GPA and MCAT scores.  Darker colors show higher numbers (that is, more counts, or higher admit rates.)  While we cannot get a sense of all takers like we do with other standardized tests, this does perhaps show some strong correlation between college GPA and MCAT scores (of course, another explanation may be that students self-select out, which then makes me wonder about that one student with less than a 2.0 GPA and less than a 486 Total MCAT score who applied, was admitted, and then enrolled. The second and third tabs show applicants by undergraduate major, and ethnicity, respectively.  Choose a value at upper ...

IPEDS just released Fall, 2017 Admissions data, and I downloaded it and took a quick look at it. If you've been here before, most of this should be self-explanatory. Three tabs, here: The first is to take a look at a single institution.  Use the control at top to select the college or university you're looking for. (Hint, type a few letters of the name to make scrolling quicker). The second tab allows you to compare ten (you can do more, but it gets messy).  I started with the ten most people want to see, but you can delete them by scrolling to their check in the drop down and deleting them, and clicking apply.  Add institutions by checking the box by their name. The final shows the relationships between test scores and Pell, which I've done before, but I never get tired of. Choose SAT or ACT calculated means for the x-axis, then limit by region and/or control if you so desire. Notes: 1) Some of the admissions data for 2017 is tentative, so anomalies are probabl...

The last several days have seen a couple of articles about the decline of history majors in America.  How big is the problem?  And is it isolated, or across the proverbial board? This will let you see the macro trend, and drill down all the way to a single institution, if you'd like. The four charts, clockwise from top left are: Raw numbers of bachelor's degrees awarded from 2011-2016 (AY); percentage of total (which only makes sense when you color the bars) to show the origins of those degrees; percentage change since the first year selected; and numeric change since the first year selected. You can color the bars by anything in the top box at right (the blue one) or just leave totals; and you can filter the results to any region, or group of years, or major group (for instance, history, or physical sciences), or even any specific institution.  And of course you can combine filters to look at Business majors in the Southeast, if you wish. That's it.  Pretty ...