Higher Ed Data Stories

 How many colleges are there, anyway?  If you're talking about the US, no one really knows.  There are a lot of reasons for this, some of which are definitional: Do you include cosmetology colleges?  Welding schools? Schools of massage therapy?  IPEDS includes many post-secondary options for students that don't offer an English or a history major.  So it's complicated. You can go to IPEDS and make your selection using "All institutions" and you'll find the "answer" is 6,527, but that's not quite right: That's how many colleges are in IPEDS, and you only have to be in IPEDS if you accept Title IV funding.  There are lots of schools in the US, like The Classical College of Baton Rouge, Louisiana; or John Witherspoon College of Rapid City, South Dakota; or Wyoming Catholic College of Lander, Wyoming, that don't take Title IV funding, and thus don't report to IPEDS.  And to complicate matters, there are colleges that don't accept Titl...

This should be a pretty easy one.  Every year, the College Board puts out data on college tuition and financial aid .  It's a great service, but of course it's all spreadsheets.  Not fun to work with.  But you can interact with the data below. Four views for you to look at: View one is just ranks: Where does your state flagship rank on tuition and fees for residents and non-residents?  Just pick which type of tuition you want to see, then use the highlighter to call out your state's flagship.  On this chart, 50 (at the top) is the highest rate; 1 (at the bottom) is the lowest. View two is a map to see relative values: Here, purple is low, and orange is high.  Choose a year, then choose a value to display: Resident tuition, non-resident tuition; non-resident premium (how much more a non-resident pays), and non-resident percent (that premium as a function of the resident rate.) View three is a single institution over time, showing your choice of inflatio...

 You know the drill.  For the past few years, I've updated this with new data as soon as IPEDS releases it.  Well, the Fall, 2019 admissions data is out, and I could have written this even before I visualized it. Your yield rate is falling.  Probably. It's falling because a) you tried to look like Harvard, so you thought generating more applications and lowering your admit rate would make you look more like them.  Because you thought that's why people liked Harvard.  Or, you felt bad about yourself, and you wanted to be able to brag to your colleagues. So you spent a lot of money generating more applications.  And you dropped your admit rate. Probably. A bit.  But here's the thing: The number of students going to college in each year is a pretty consistent percentage of the high school graduates, give or take.  And if every graduate applies to one more college, well, they can still only attend one in the end.  Boom.  Your yield rate...

Now that almost every university in the nation has gone test-optional for the 2021 cycle out of necessity, a nagging question remains: How many will go back to requiring tests as soon as it's possible?  No one knows, but some of the announcements some colleges made sounded like the kid who only ate his green beans to get his screen time: They did it, but they sure were not happy about it.  So we have some suspicions about the usual suspects. I don't object to colleges requiring tests, of course, even though I think they're not very helpful, intrinsically biased against certain groups, and a tool of the vain.  You be you, though, and don't let me stop you. However, there is a wild card in all of this: The recent court ruling prohibiting the University of California system from even using--let alone requiring--the SAT or ACT in admissions decisions next fall.  If you remember, the Cal State system had already decided to go test blind, and of course community colleges ...

If you ask the average person how many colleges there are in the US, the answer you get will depend on who that person is: If they work at the Wall Stree Journal or New York Times, they might say, "No more than 20." If you ask someone who thinks in terms of traditional post-secondary options where there is a campus quad and residence halls, you might hear "about a thousand."  But how many are there, really? Now you might get close to the answer.  And, of course, the answer will depend on your definition.  For Fall, 2019, IPEDS lists 6,527 post-secondary institutions in the US. There are more, but not every college in the US has to report to IPEDS. If an institution doesn't administer Title IV aid, it can operate without reporting data to the government. But the vast majority are there and ready for you to explore.  This visualization is pretty simple: Two charts, one at the bottom which is static and shows the full 6,527 as a constant; and one at the top th...

I bought another camera, so I had hoped to spend the weekend out and about doing some photography , but this weekend is one of those rare ones in the Pacific Northwest where the temperature is cracking 100 °  F.   So I decided to stay inside, for the most part, and take a look at a data set I had downloaded for some others at the university. My original intent in doing this was to refresh the visualization I had done on Simpson's Diversity Index.  It's the way an ecologist looks at the diversity of an eco-system, and it puts the question in a new light: If you select two students from the population, what are the chances they'll be different along a specified dimension, in this case, ethnicity?  The first time I did it, I calculated the index at the institution level in Excel, then imported the data into Tableau.  That works, but you can't look at the data in any way other than by institution.  So, if I wanted to look at states, or regions, or public or pr...

This morning, The Chronicle of Higher Education published a story about the University of South Carolina, and its ambitious goal to bring African-American enrollment more in line with the state's population of African-American residents.  Given that the state population is over a quarter African-American, and USC's student population is about 9.5%, and given the timeline (by 2025), this goal is ambitious, to say the least. The story had a chart, showing the mathematical gap of the states, using a simple measure: Percentage of African-Americans in the state flagship institution, minus the percentage of African-American students in the state population.  In case you can't get to the story (and if you work in education you really should consider supporting our trade paper with a subscription), it looks like this: On this map, you can see the light colors, where the gap is the largest, and the dark colors, where the gap is the smallest, or in some cases, actually negative (tha...