Higher Ed Data Stories

 Since not much interesting has happened in the last 18 months or so, I decided to take a look at bachelor's degrees awarded in the most recent IPEDS data release. This has always been a popular dashboard with anyone who works with students, and I've had several requests to update it.  While I normally don't do requests, this seems to fill an important void in the college counseling world, so I made an exception. There are three views here: The first ( Find Colleges by Program ) allows you to find which colleges award the most degrees in a specified area, defined either broadly, very broadly, or very narrowly.  It also allows you to only look at the colleges of interest, and even allows you to look at the ethnicity and/or gender of the degree recipients. The big box of orange text explains how to interact; make sure you read it if you're not familiar with Tableau.  Filters with red text change the type of institutions that display; filters with blue text change the s...

This is my annual (sort of) look at tuition at public universities across America.  Even when I worked at private universities, this was a topic of interest to me, and it should be for you too. Public universities educate the vast majority of students in the US (and when you add in community colleges, the skew toward publics becomes even more pronounced.)  There are real consequences to an educated population, as I've written about here and here and many other places. There is no definition of "Flagship University" but we can look at Land Grant institutions, of which there are three categories: The institutions chartered as a result of the 1862 Morrill Act; the 1890 institutions, of which many are HBCUs; and the 1990 institutions, which include many Tribal Colleges and community colleges. For this, I've chosen the 1862 land grants, the flagships (see below) and the other large public universities, with enrollments over 20,000 undergraduates in order to get the great...

This week, I was tagged in a tweet by Akil Bello , asking about capacity in higher education in the US.  My first response was that there was no way to measure capacity; no one asks this in federal reporting, and any way to attempt to measure it was fraught with problems. Remember this point as I attempt to do just that. At the same time, I've been hearing more about the decreases in college enrollment nationwide, and I've wanted to respond to them and supply some context.  So, I think I might be able to accomplish both with one post and one visualization. On the latter point, you want to take a look at the first tab (across the top) Total Enrollment Trends . You can see that we have experienced some drop-off in total enrollment (gray line for totals and colored lines by segments). Hover over the lines to see how much they've changed from 1980 and from the prior year.  Measured against the dramatic increase over a longer period of time, the drop-off might be viewed as a b...

In 2017, I stumbled upon some 2016 election data and started to look at the relationship between educational attainment in the US and election results .  The title was only half serious, but some people took exception to it.  Still, it's remained a topic of interest to me since then.   Before I begin writing about the latest visualization, let me point out a couple of things on this new display with the 2020 election data.  You'll likely notice some similar patterns, but patterns don't prove causality.  Even if they did, I could come up with two equally plausible explanations of this data that come at the answer from diametrically opposed political perspectives. Take your pick, or just look and see what you find interesting.  It doesn't always have to lead to something. This time we're dealing with another hot political topic, COVID-19 and vaccinations.  And, it seemed to me that the political divisions in America tend to fall along the same lines...

My last post looked at the US population by ethnicity , and how it varied by age group in the states.  I thought it might be interesting for anyone, but especially for those who do university planning or enrollment forecasting, as income and ethnicity factor into college going rates. It made me wonder about each state and the state of public education: Specifically, how does enrollment at public universities in each state compare to the population of college-aged people (generally speaking) in that state? So I re-used that data and merged some enrollment data into the mix, and voilà, as they say. What this shows: On the top chart, you see undergraduate enrollment at four-year and two-year public institutions in the US, broken out by ethnicity.  I've excluded international students and those for whom an ethnicity is not known, both of which are about 3.5% of the total.  This allows for easier comparison against the US population (where there is no category for either.) On...

 As is often the case, this started with some work I was doing anyway regarding a question someone asked me about different states and public universities and how the composition of the student body mirrored or varied from the population in general.  That will probably come about later, but for now, a look at just the population. With a few exceptions, most of the enrollment at your institution is driven by geography; the majority of your enrollment will come from within 500 miles of  your campus. (The exception might be states like Texas, where I once looked at data for a private university and told them that--from a geodemographic standpoint, their top three markets were Texas, Texas, and Texas.) In addition, though, age is a confounding factor.  In the US, as you look at older populations, you get more white people; as you look at younger populations, you see more diversity.  Thus, it's not just the makeup of the state; it's the makeup of the people in the st...

First things first: Let's define what IPEDS calls Net Price: You can read all the details here , or just realize it's the cost that students and parents are expected to pay after all grant aid is awarded.  The average is only calculated for those who receive aid.  If you have questions beyond what is found on the link above, you'll have to ask someone else to explain it. Some limitations: This data is for Fall, 2018, and it's by income bands that have been around a long time: Under $30,000, and then in increments up to anyone over $110,000.  That top threshold is clearly too low, with some college budgets exceeding $70,000 annually. There are four views here that go from very high-level overviews to more granular, and ends with 45 private, selective colleges who have a unique quirk in their pricing, or so it might seem. View 1: All Values Arrayed shows the entire landscape in a box and whiskers plot.  The gray boxes show were the middle 50% of the (unweighted) distri...

 Let's take a look at undergraduate enrollment by ethnicity.  You'd be surprised how hard it is to keep this to seven views, as the topic is complex and nuanced.  But I did. The topic should be self-explanatory: Who goes to college where?  And there are six views, using the tabs across the top: Single Ethnicity Percents allows you to see which institutions have the largest percentage of students of the selected ethnicity.  The view starts with Hawaiian Natives and Other Pacific Islanders, but you can choose any of nine different groups using the filter on the top right.  If you want to limit the universe of colleges, use the filters down the left-hand side.  Maybe you want to look at Asian students but only at HBCUs, for instance. Single Ethnicity Counts is identical, but it uses counts instead of percentages. Filters work the same way. The next two views are static: Student Ethnicities and Destinations is easy to read once you understand it.  H...

 A few weeks ago, I saw this Twitter thread by James Murph y, and it reminded me of something.  If you don't want to read the thread, it has to do with the seemingly enormous advantage private school students have in the admissions process at the highly rejective colleges ( hat tip to Akil Bello for that term. ) What it reminded me of was the data that College Board publishes annually on AP results . It's good of them to do so, but when data is published in massive spreadsheets, the conspiracy theorist in me starts to wonder if there isn't an attempt to claim transparency while attempting obfuscate the patterns.  Even if you manage to download the data, the tables are formatted for printing, not analysis, and it's sliced and diced in ways that make it impossible to do a lot of the detailed analysis you'd might like. But what we have is what we got.  And what I chose to look at today were the tabs that broke out performance on AP exams by test and ethnicity and scho...

If you're not following Akil Bello on Twitter, you should be.  His timeline is filled with great insights about standardized testing, and he takes great effort to point out racism (both subtle and not-so-subtle) in higher education, all while throwing in references to the Knicks and his daughter Enid, making the experience interesting, compelling, and sometimes, fun. Recently, he created the term " highly rejective colleges " as a more apt description for what are otherwise called "highly selective colleges."  As I've said before, a college that admits 15% of applicants really has a rejections office, not an admissions office.  The term appears to have taken off on Twitter, and I hope it will stick. So I took a look at the highly rejectives (really, that's all I'm going to call them from now on) and found some interesting patterns in the data. Take a look:  The 1,132 four-year, private colleges and universities with admissions data in IPEDS are incl...

 The question often asked by high school and independent counselors is something like, "What college offers degrees in <insert major name>.  While this can't help you know what colleges offer a specific degree, it can tell you which colleges awarded those degrees in 2019. It can also help you see the shape of degrees awarded in the US, and even dive deeper into a specific college to see what types of degrees  It's pretty straight-forward, but there are also some features you need to be aware of.  If you know how to Tableau, go ahead and dive right in. The first view  using the tabs across the top shows all degrees awarded by US colleges in 2019.  From there, you can choose any specific combination of student and college characteristics: For instance, if you want to find which institutions award the most bachelor's degrees at public universities in the southwest, just click.  If you then want to find which of those colleges offer the most degrees ...

I saw an opinion piece in Insider Higher Ed this week, and this statistic jumped out at me:  Four-year institutions are graduating a third more women than men.  It's not that the statistic was surprising, of course.  Almost everyone who has looked at higher ed data knows the increasing educational attainment of women has been one of most notable trends in our profession.  (Of course, the real story is the reason women didn't have higher attainment prior up until now.) If you look at this NCES Digest of Education Statistics table, and do a little math, you can see the trend for yourself. In 1970, women made up only 35% of all college enrollment; by 1988, that figure had risen to 50%, and by 2019, it was 60%. This trend mirrors bachelor's degrees as well.  In 2019, about 58% of BAs were awarded to women, and 42% to men.  While the trend is remarkably consistent across all Carnegie types, regions, and levels of control, the statistics between and among indiv...