Higher Ed Data Stories

This is a sort of a lull for Higher Ed Data Stories.  It's summer, for one, and the data release cycles have not yet geared up. So instead, I want to write about the ten things that would make it easier to produce HEDS on those occasions when there is good data to work with.  You know I use Tableau to create the data visualizations you find here. It's been a tool that has changed my career: The value of being able to answer questions with a click (especially when you're in a room with someone up the hierarchy and that person is doing the asking) can't be overstated. The original vision of Tableau--To allow people to see and interact with their data--was made just for people like me: Interested, a bit curious, but not especially technically proficient.  I owe a lot to the company (and there are probably at least 25 colleges who got introduced to Tableau through my early excitement about the product, so maybe they owe me a bit, too, even though I know Higher Ed is not a h...

I'm not sure if this will be the last AP post I make, but it sure seems that way, unless people (including those of us who are members of the, you know, membership organization called College Board) put enough pressure on them to continue providing data in the detailed format like they've always done. In case you don't know, College Board used to put very granular data on its website, for anyone to download and examine.  You could look at data by state, by student ethnicity, by specific exam, and by AP score.  For instance, this was a sample from one of the years showing the state of Alabama.  You can see the data, and at the bottom, see other breakouts: Public schools, male/female, 11th/12th graders, etc.  It was a gold mine of data, if you wanted to spend the time looking and digging and calculating.  I've only scratched the surface in the three or four posts I've done on this blog, partly because the data are in spreadsheet format, and it takes a lot of clea...

There is another article making the rounds in higher education about the advantages men have in the admissions process.  It's sort of interesting, because while you can look at the available data a lot of different ways, you'd really need to look at the data you can't see to draw the conclusions everyone seems to have drawn. Here is the article , and what you'll probably notice is that the headline--the part everyone reads--is sort of walked back in the article.  I know the people who write the headlines are not the same people who write the article, but sometimes it seems like the two should actually, you know, talk to each other. First, the data, in three views below, followed by a caveat: The first view, Individual Institutions , shows all the public and private, not-for-profit four-year institutions who a) admit freshmen, b) publish data for both men and women (which excludes a lot of women's colleges, and Yeshivahs, for instance) and c) say they are not open ad...

Each time I publish this visualization I get a lot of traffic on the site, and I can see why. It shows all doctoral recipients (in 2016-2020) broken out by where they received their bachelor's degrees.  So, for instance, the top level view shows that UC Berkeley is the alma mater of more doctoral recipients than any other institution, followed by The University of Michigan and Cornell University. That would be interesting, but of course, these are large institutions, and it's natural to think lots of graduates will lead to lots of doctoral degrees.  No surprise there. So the visualization allows you to look at the types of colleges you or your students might want: Select a state, select public or private, select by Carnegie type if you wish.  You can also look at HBCUs if you'd like.  Most important, you can filter by doctoral degree, so if you want to see which institution sends the most students to doctorates in chemistry, you can do so. To head off the questions I...

The recent SCOTUS ruling overturning Roe v. Wade has set off an interesting debate about student college choice.  People who favor legal access to abortion seem convinced that students--especially women--will change their college plans based on the climate in the state of the college(s) they're considering. Will it?  I don't know.  I do know that when everyone seems to be convinced of something related to college admissions and student choice, the reality is often very different than the predictions, after all is said and done.  And on the other hand, this feels different, somehow.  To repeat: I don't know. Of course, the ability of students to migrate across state lines is generally reserved for those with more wealth and privilege, and as I've demonstrated before ( here and here ), educated and wealthier communities tend to vote Democratic, and thus, are more likely to be pro-choice and more likely to be upset by the SCOTUS decision.  And I, like a lot of...

I'm on vacation this week, and didn't plan to do anything on the blogs unless something really pressing came up. Something really pressing came up. It borders on scandalous. By now, you've probably heard that a certain university successfully trademarked the word "The."   How this happens, I have no idea; I'm not a lawyer (and that sound you hear is all the lawyers saying, "no kidding.")  But it happened. And that's not the really pressing thing, nor is it the scandalous thing.  But follow along. The news bothered me and others on Twitter, so I felt compelled to take a look at university names, specifically the first word of their names, using official designations in IPEDS.  I broke this into three categories: Those whose names started with "The," those whose names started with "University," and those whose names started with "College," plus the category of "Other." My thinking was that there are already m...

 It's been a while since I wrote about diversity using Simpson's Diversity Index, which is an ecologist's way of looking at diversity of a population.  Essentially, Simpson's gives us a number that helps us answer this question: If two members of a population are randomly selected, what is the probability that they will be from different groups?  The formula for Simpson's creates a value between 0 and 1.  If we use it to look at different racial or ethnic groups in colleges, we'd find that a college with a score of .62 is more diverse than one with a score of .51, for instance. This is different than the way we think about diversity in higher education, which often means the percentage of students who are from underrepresented groups (Hispanic, or African-American for instance.)  Using that classic definition, Florida A&M (with 86% African-American enrollment) would be very diverse; using Simpson's, it is the least diverse public institution in Florida....

The world of college admission--or at least the discussion of it--is too often focused on freshman admission, and then, too often focused on freshman admission at the highly rejective colleges (h/t to Akil Bello ).  People tend to think most students apply to a college at age 17 or 18, spend four years at that one institution, and then graduate.   But just like the Kardashians aren't reflective of the typical American family even though they get a lot of press, neither is that little sliver of college admissions reflective of the reality of our profession .   Transfers have become a topic of interest to people who cover higher education recently, with stories in all the big, national media outlets.  So I decided to take a look at some data from IPEDS to see what the national trends look like. Even though I limited the view of this data to four-year colleges and universities that offer degrees, that doesn't tell the whole story: A lot of students transfer fr...

Much has been made recently of changes in enrollment in US Higher Ed: Fewer males ( is it a crisis or not? ).  Shrinking enrollments .  Changes in admissions due to test optional and COVID . In this recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education , I recently pointed out that one of the ways colleges stayed viable during previous enrollment shifts was to expand both physical campus locations and offerings and degree programs tailored to working adults.  So that got me thinking about the shifts in enrollment by age, something I'd not explicitly looked at before. On the surface it may not seem that exciting, but if you dig down enough and connect the dots, you might find some interesting societal trends.  So follow along. Before we do, if you're using this data in your professional life, either as a college EM staff member or a for-profit consultant, I appreciate your support for my time, webhosting, and software costs.  You can show support by clicking here. So...

Yes, it may be that your enrollment is falling.  Or, it may be rising.  That could be bad, or it could be good.  But if you do enrollment management for a living, and you talk to your trustees or alumni or anyone else who's interested, you might be interested in another metric that is perhaps more telling:  Market share. As I've written many times, there are factors outside of our control that influence how many students enroll in our institutions: Demographics, the economy, your appearance in the Final Four (or maybe not ), things that happen on campus, bad media exposure, or even perhaps, the weather.  The amount of the effect, of course is debatable, and it's too easy to get roped into the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. (When I worked in Chicago we once had an admitted student program on St. Patrick's Day, and a few drunk revelers found their way into the Student Center at 10 am and passed out, requiring an ambulance.  The yield on that event was a...

I'm going to recommend you read this one closely before you dive into the visualization, as there is a lot of context necessary to understand it.  It's mostly driven by the different ways the US Government counts its own citizens compared to the ways in which the US Government requires colleges to count its students. As you probably know, when a student applies for admission (or any time after they enroll), they have the option of indicating race or ethnicity.  If a student indicates Hispanic origin, regardless of their race, they're counted as Hispanic.  If not, students can indicate a race or ethnicity (Asian, Native American, etc.). In the census, "Hispanic" is not considered a race or ethnicity, but an origin.  People who indicate they are of Hispanic origin are still asked to indicate a race on the census form. Thus, when you want to compare the diversity of education to the diversity of the population, you're faced with comparing apples to oranges.  And ...

I often wonder if we'd have an application fee if we were creating the admissions process from scratch today.  But we do, and there are actually some good reasons for doing so, not the least of which is that it costs a lot of money to process and manage applications. Some people have wondered aloud whether app fees are simply a money-making enterprise for colleges, and the answer is yes, no, and sort of.  We can't think of universities as charities, and the people doing the work of admissions have to get paid; conceptually, it makes sense to charge a fee to applicants, since some substantial percentage of them will never pay tuition on your campus. But it's too easy and incorrect to multiply applications by the app fee and assume that money flows into the admissions office.  Even at those universities where the streams are directed to admissions rather than into a general fund, some substantial percentage of students get a fee waiver.  And, as you'll see, about half ...