Higher Ed Data Stories

It's been quite a while since I looked at application fees, so I thought I'd review them again. I've never understood the idea of application fees; I suppose you can say they're not unreasonable, given that the college is offering a service to people who are not (yet) students. On the other hand, acquisition costs are a part of any business cost, and if you're into crass comparisons, imagine if you had to pay a fee of some sort before you could even try to buy a car. Anyway, this is pretty simple and shows you two views: The first view (using the tabs across the top) shows an array of college app fees, based on how much they charge. I've broken them into groups ($10 or under, over over $250, for instance.) The top bar charts aggregate the data, and the bottom chart breaks the data into individual colleges. Hover over a dot for details. If you work in admissions and want to compare your app fees to competitors or any group of colleges, use the filters...

In 2015, I wrote this post on falling yield rates.  It was pretty obvious to many of us in the profession that this trend was widespread, and largely driven by a dramatic increase in applications against a more modest increase in actual students who could or would enroll. It apparently wasn't so obvious to everyone.  Response was much stronger than I thought it would be, and I never had seen so many requests from people who wanted to share it with their trustees (btw, this is public; you never have to ask permission to share). So I redid it, using trend data from 2005 to 2018.  First a couple of definitions: Admit rate is the percentage of applicants who were offered admission (admits/applicants). Yield rate is the percentage of admitted students who enroll (enrollers/admits). Draw rate is not commonly known, and I wish I remember who first mentioned it to me in the 1980's.  It stuck with me and is a valuable metric, I think, as we attempt to measure ...

It's always good to get some perspective. And thus, every so often, I download fresh data and do this visualization, with a few variations on a theme. We love to focus our collective attention and wonder on a handful of high profile, well known, well resourced, and highly selective institutions. Is that amount of attention warranted? You decide. This shows just under 2,400 four-year public and private, not-for-profit institutions. I've broken these institutions into selectivity bands, based on 2018 freshman admissions data. You can see how many there are, how many students they enroll, how much of endowment they collectively control, and and what their average endowments are on the first tab. The second tab looks at variables by percentage of totals: Thus, not how much, but what percentage? Be sure to read the Data Notes tab for a few minor caveats. This is not precise, but the patterns would hold for the most part. Of course, you can also see what percentage of co...

Freshman Migration--or patterns of enrollment by new students, has always been of interest to me.  So I'm always thrilled when IPEDS releases new data, and the 2018 stuff is out.  This time, I decided to download every bit of it that's available, and give users the option to take a longer view, if they want. Some caveats: IPEDS only requires this data in even-numbered years, so that's what I downloaded.  Still, there are some colleges that did not report for some years; don't write to let me know about it, as I've included it if they did.  Second, there are always a few mistakes in the data.  One year I found that Harvard reported 237 freshmen from Arkansas when they meant California. It happens. Anyway, four views here, using the tabs across the top: Freshman Migration Patterns shows data over time: What number and percentage of students went to college in-state, in-region, or out-of-region.  Use the filter at top right to choose one state.  Th...

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...