Higher Ed Data Stories

I bet you've heard about the enrollment crisis in American colleges and universities, and I bet you think that men are avoiding college in droves, even if you work at a college and see lots of men on campus.  And you wonder, "How can this be?" Well, it's not exactly the crisis the media are making it out to be.  Here are some views to help you see that. I downloaded data from IPEDS: Undergraduate and graduate enrollment from 2010 to 2020 (in even years) and visualized it for you, in three views.  The first is simple, showing graduate and undergraduate enrollment at all US post-secondary institutions over time.  You can use the filters to look at a region and/or any combination of ethnicities. The second view is even cleaner: It shows all enrollment, broken out by gender percentages, and you can see the trend over time.  If you're interested in a region or a Carnegie cluster, or any specific ethnicities, and level (either graduate or undergraduate). The third vie...

If you're alive today, you have lived your whole life with college rankings.  Yes, even you.  You may not have knows you were living in the time of college rankings, but indeed, you have been, unless you were born before 1911 (or maybe earlier.)  If you're interested, you can read this Twitter thread from 2020 where I discuss them and include snippets of those 1911 rankings as well as those from 1957, written by Chesley Manly. You can read for yourself, or you can trust me, that in fact the rankings as we know them have been surprisingly consistent over time, and most people would have only minor quibbles with the ratings from 1911.  Perhaps that's because they have always tended to measure the same thing. But what if we did different rankings?  No, not like the Princeton Review where they make an attempt to measure best party school, or best cafeteria food, or worst social life.  Something more quantifiable and concrete, although still, admittedly, a hard...

I started doing this post on a regular basis several years ago, in response (if I recall) to a colleague talking about their Board of Trustees Chair insisting that "all we need to do" to bring enrollment back to its former level is to get the yield rate up.   That's the equivalent of saying all you need to do is straighten your drives and cut ten putts from each round, and you'll be a great golfer.  Moreover, it's based on the assumption that a falling yield rate is based on something you're doing or not doing.  The challenge is much larger, and a lot harder to address.  It's not a switch you flip. So we've got this: A look at applications, admits, and enrolls over the last twenty years, and three key ratios that are based on those numbers: Admit rate, or the percentage of applicants offered admission; yield rate, or the percentage of those offered admission who enroll; and the lesser-known draw rate, which is calculated by dividing the yield rate by t...

First, a quiz: What do these states have in common?  (Hint: Regular readers of this blog will already know the answer.  And you will too, shortly.) The prompt for this post is generated by friend and colleague Akil Bello, who, apparently while watching college football the weekend after thanksgiving, tweeted this question : The answer is multi-faceted and complex, and likely varies a lot between the states.  And the question really assumes something that isn't true: Oregon, for instance, no longer has a single state system, and some states have several.  But the question--Why is there a University of North Carolina and a North Carolina State University--is a good one.  This question might be asked of several of the states, all indicated on the map above; these are the states with both a flagship university and a land grant university.  Other states (Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota, among others) have one university that serves as both a land grant and a ...

You know I love this data set of freshman migration patterns over time.  It shows every college in two year increments, and contains the state-by-state makeup of the freshman class.  I like it for a couple of reasons: First, it's interesting in its own right to see where colleges attract students from.  I think students can use it too, to see how geographically diverse the colleges they're looking at really are. But beyond that, there are so many questions you can pose this data and come away with some insight. Previously, I've visualized this data several times, most recently here , with a focus on helping high school and independent counselors add a layer of information to student choice sets.  This time, I think it might be of interest to enrollment management people and perhaps state policy makers.  Or anyone who finds this interesting. If you find Higher Ed Data Stories helpful in your work and you're not a high school counselor, you can support the cost of...

I've posted this visualization a few times, but never embedded it in a blog post. Now's the time.  Teresa Watanabe of the LA Times tweeted this today. So, for the foreseeable future, no one will need an ACT or SAT to gain admission to the UC or Cal State system campuses.  And in fact, testing won't help you get in, either.  For lots of students, there will be no need to test. Consider: In 2018, about 275,000 students enrolled in California public four-year, and private, not-for-profit four year institutions (I'm using 2018 as it's the last good year prior to 2020's COVID-affected enrollment numbers). Just under 250,000 of them came from California.  California exported about 40,000 students to other states. About 90% of them (roughly 36,000) went to the types of colleges that might require the SAT or ACT (four-year public and private not-for-profits). What this means: Fewer students testing in California.  Neighboring and western test-optional-friendly states li...

 A lot has been made of graduation rates at America's colleges and universities.  Some point to what they see as rates that are too low, while others think that high graduation rates are a testament to something happening inside the college. And I, of course, think graduation rates are mostly inputs, rather than outputs .  If your admissions process simply takes the most capable children of wealthy, college-educated parents, it's almost a certainty your graduation rates will be higher.  If you take more risks in admitting students--either by mission or economic necessity--your graduation rates are going to be lower. But there is still some interesting stuff in the IPEDS data.  A few caveats about this data: First, I've started the views showing only traditional doctoral, master's and baccalaureate institutions.  Other types, which tend to be smaller, have noisier data.  You can look at them if you wish by using the Carnegie rollups, region, and control...

I've often said that the visualization on educational attainment in the US was perhaps the first visualization I did that blew my mind.  I thought it was a problem with the data. And, frankly, I'm possibly more amazed that more people aren't amazed.  I've done a few posts on this topic, and it never seems to get much traction.  So I'll give it another shot this time. In 1940, less than 5% of adults in the US had a college degree or more.  By 2020, it's risen to almost 38%.  I was born in the late 50's and when I went to college in the 70's, the number was still only in the 15% range.  That's why the term "first generation" wasn't even a thing: The majority of college students at that time were probably first gen kids. We were all a spillover effect of WWII and the GI Bill, which offered college access to the veterans who made it back alive ( but unfortunately, the benefits didn't go to everyone who fought ).  And if we know one thin...

Every year, The College Board releases summaries of the prior year's AP program .  While I've visualized these before ( here and here ), I've been unwilling to update the visualizations or do longitudinal analysis, for a couple of reasons:  First, the data are in multiple tables in multiple spreadsheets, and they are so heavily formatted for printing that scraping the data out of them is quite a burden.  Second, of course, is that the scores don't change a lot from one year to the next. That is, until 2020, when COVID completely turned the world of higher education upside down.  I was interested in seeing how much scores changed from prior years.  As you can see, the changes are interesting, if not completely surprising. By the way, if you enjoy Higher Ed Data Stories and use it in your work, you can support the web hosting and other costs associated with producing the content by Buying Me A Coffee, here .  If you're a high school teacher or counselor, just...

Each year, NACUBO comes out with its discount study .  If you're not a member, you get a nice press release and some pdfs.  Even if you are a member, you only get a chance to buy the study. And that's enough for most people.  But not for the readers of Higher Ed Data Stories, I've found. Let's talk about discount for a minute.  Different colleges talk about it differently, and even with this IPEDS data, it's impossible to be precise.  But discount rate essentially calculates how much of a college's tuition revenue is offered to students as institutional financial aid. But there are some nuances to it.  Let's start with an example.  College X enrolls 1,000 students, and it charges tuition of $40,000.  That means gross revenue is $40,000,000.  If that college offers institutional aid of $10,000,000 to students, its discount rate is 10/40 or 25%.  If it offers $20,000,000 its discount is 20/40 or 50%.  Sounds easy. But the assumption i...

This week our trade publication, The Chronicle of Higher Education took a quick look at changes in enrollment between Fall, 2019, and Fall, 2020.  If you don't work in higher ed, you can read a few stories per month for free with a registration.  If you do, there is no reason you shouldn't be a subscriber. Something happened in the spring of 2019 that might have had a big effect on college enrollment.  But we're never, of course, 100% sure just how much effect it had.  But the subject is fascinating, of course, and I found the Chronicle's overview to be less than fulfilling.  That's OK, of course.  A good report will cause you to have more questions, not fewer. So I went off to the IPEDS data center and downloaded data to look for myself.  My methodology is a little different than CHE's (I included all colleges, whereas they excluded some smaller institutions).  While the overall results are similar, the nuances--those things you find between the...

(Note: I discovered that in IPEDS, Penn State Main Campus now reports with "The Pennsylvania State University" as one system.  So when you'd look at things over time, Penn State would have data until 2018, and then The Penn....etc would show up in 2020.  I found out Penn State main campus still reports its own data on the website, so I went there, and edited the IPEDS data by hand.  So if you noticed that error, it should be corrected now, but I'm not sure what I'll do in years going forward.) Freshman migration to and from the states is always a favorite visualization of mine, both because I find it a compelling and interesting topic, and because I had a few breakthroughs with calculated variables the first time I tried to do it. If you're a loyal reader, you know what this shows: The number of freshman and their movement between the states.  And if you're a loyal viewer and you use this for your work in your business, please consider supporting the costs...