Higher Ed Data Stories

I started this visualization to show how first-year classes at the highly rejective colleges had changed since COVID-19 forced them all to go to a test-optional approach for the Fall of 2021.  But it sort of took on a life of its own after that, as big, beefy data sets often do. The original point was to help discount the conventional wisdom, which is propped up by a limited, old study of a small set of colleges that showed test-optional policies didn't affect diversity.  I did this post last year , after just one year of data made it fairly clear they did at the institutions that had the luxury of selecting and shaping their class.  This year I took it a little farther.  The views, using the tabs across the top, show the same trends (now going to 2022) for Public Land Grants, Public Flagships, the Ivy and Ivy+ Institutions.  In each case, choose one using the control. Note that I had colored the years by national trends: 2018 and 2019 are pre-test optional, gra...

 Enrollment, as I like to say, is complicated.  But that never stopped anyone from asking a question like, "How does enrollment look?" To help answer, I downloaded IPEDS data of enrollment from 2009 to 2022, breaking it out by full-time and part-time, graduate and undergraduate, and gender, and put it into three different views, below, using the tabs across the top.  As always, you need to be a bit careful jumping to any conclusions about this: There is no easy (or even any hard) way I know of to account for the way Penn State has named and renamed itself over time, and changed the way it reported data, for instance, so anomalies will always show up there.  But for the most part, this information is very accurate.  The first view shows summary data.  This is just to get topline information about trends in US higher education enrollments over time.  Choose the type of enrollment at top right, then filter down to the specific categories you'd like to se...

A new approach to freshman migration, which is always a popular post on Higher Ed Data Stories. If you're a regular reader, you can go right to the visualization and start interacting with it.  And I can't stress enough: You need to use the controls and click away to get the most from these visualizations. If you're new, this post focuses on one of the most interesting data elements in IPEDS: The geographic origins of first-year (freshman) students over time.  My data set includes institutions in the 50 states and DC.  It includes four-year public and four-year, private not-for-profits that participate in Title IV programs; and it includes traditional institutions using the Carnegie classification (Doctoral, Masters, Baccalaureate, and Special Focus Schools in business, engineering, and art/design. Data from other institutions is noisy and often unreliable, or (in the case of colleges in Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and other territories, often shows close to 100% of enro...

If you believe you can extract strategy from prior activities, I have something for you to try to make sense of here.  This is a long compilation of tuition and fees at America's Flagship and Land Grant institutions.  If you are not quite sure about the distinction between those two types of institutions, you might want to read this first .  TLDR: Land Grants were created by an act of congress, and for this purpose, flagships are whoever I say they are.  There doesn't seem to be a clear definition.   Further, for this visualization, I've only selected the first group of Land Grants, funded by the Morrill Act of 1862.  They tend to be the arch rival of the Flagship, unless, of course, they're the same institution. Anyway, today I'm looking at tuition, something you'd think would be pretty simple.  But there are at least four ways to measure this: Tuition, of course, but also tuition and required fees, and both are different for residents and nonres...

This is always a popular topic, but the subject is misunderstood.  I want to talk about discount rate at private colleges.   IPEDS has the best data on first-year (or freshman) discount, so that's what I visualize.  And the first part of this is going to get a bit into the weeds; if you work in a private college or university, and you use this in your work, or you send it to trustees, you can support my time, effort, software, and hosting costs by buying me a coffee .  If  you don't want the details, and you think you understand this concept, feel free to skip down to the section that breaks down the views, below the line of asterisks. For those who always ask, no, I don't do this for public universities.  It may be helpful to compare institutions within a state, but beyond that, state funding models and the mix of resident and nonresident tuition rates make comparisons across borders mostly meaningless.  And for the more knowledgeable who might w...

We finally got the delayed 2022 admissions data from IPEDS yesterday, and I spent the better part of the evening working on pulling this together.  Counselors, parents, students, and admissions/enrollment management officers tell me this is a helpful tool to use while thinking about the state of college admission. There are four views here: All institutions interactive shows admission data for all institutions who report it to IPEDS: The number of applications for the first-year class, the number of students offered admission, and the number who enrolled, shown on the bar charts at top.  Then, below, I've calculated admit rates, yield rates, and draw rates.  Admit rate is total admits/total applications; Yield rate is total enrolls/total admits.  And draw rate is yield/admit rate. Draw rate is intended to show fake, artificially deflated admit rates.  I've written about this a lot, but essentially if you try to look more selective than you are by pumping up ...

This post is popular every year, and I've just updated it with the most recent NSF data (you can find the link to create your own tables on the visualization if you want.) It shows the undergraduate college of people who received doctorates in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022.  As you can see from the top-level view, UC Berkeley produces more graduates who go onto a doctorate than any other institution in the US.  But maybe that's not what you need: You might be working with one of those special high school students who already knows they want to get a doctorate, or you might want to show which college from a group of peers sends the most people to a Ph.D. or Ed.D.  Or you might want bragging rights against your alma mater's bitter academic rival. This visualization, of course is interactive. So use the controls at top to find colleges by region, by religious affiliation, or by broad Carnegie type.  And filter further to find, for instance, the liberal arts college in the ...

Note: A few people have commented on slow loading with the visualization.  If you have troubles, click here to be taken right to the visualization .  It should open in a new tab and you can follow along from there.    This is always a popular post with high school counselors, IECs, parents, and students who are looking for general information on degrees awarded, or a very specific combination of academic programs, location, and other institutional characteristics. It uses IPEDS data I downloaded as soon as I can when it became available (and before a looming government shutdown), and shows all 1,700 majors recognized by the federal government in the IPEDS system, using CIP codes, and the number of degrees awarded by college in any selected area. For instance, you might have a question about which college awards the most degrees in French Language and Literature: A few clicks, and you find it's the University of Arizona.  If you want a colder climate, choose the ...

College attainment is a compelling topic for me.  Both of my parents had educations that stopped at the 8th grade (although my mother got a GED as an adult), and none of my siblings graduated from college.  So I'm keenly aware of the value of a college degree, and the importance of the opportunity to earn a degree. But where opportunity resides, and how that has shifted over time, are both important topics worthy of exploration and discussion. I suppose it's no secret that urban areas in the US have more college educated people than rural areas do.  But has it always been that way? Yes.  And no. Yes, it's always been that way because on average, rural areas have always had lower college degree attainment rates that urban areas. No, it's not always been as bad as it is now.  As educational attainment in the US increased ( see this visualization , which was so astonishing to me that I had to check the numbers; I've updated it here ) most of that increase has accru...

The College Board has finally put new AP data up on its website after a hiatus of a couple of years.  I had previously blogged about their decision to take it down from their website, after some attention that removal had received in the national press , and, unfortunately, some amplification by the right-wing elements who believe that differences in scores by ethnicity are driven by innate biological attributes, rather than things like parental attainment, family income, and opportunity, all of which look a lot like ethnicity to people who feel bad about themselves.   I did a special visualization for them to show some of these patterns. Choose national or state, and see how mean AP scores line up with median family income (the visualization is purposely abstruse, by the way, with no labels on the data points or axes.) Anyway, the new data are up, but in different formats from those that had been previously provided. College Board (in its effort to " ...

I don't mean the business of enrollment is complicated (although it is, at times); I mean talking about enrollment is complicated.  When I get on the elevator with someone, the question is always, "how is enrollment looking?" Unless everything is wonderful, or everything is awful, there is really no answer to that, because even at one institution, enrollment is made up of several different types of enrollment: New first-year, new transfers, overall graduates, overall undergraduates. returning students, full-time, part-time, students in different colleges, and, if you work at a public institution, residents and nonresidents. There are ebbs and flows in all those streams, but of course, the average elevator ride is not long enough to explain that all. So, too, our national discussions about enrollment are complicated.  You have heard about the enrollment crisis, of course, but when you dive down, you see it's really mostly a challenge at our nation's community colle...

Last week, we conducted a--well, not a survey, exactly--of high school and independent counselors, asking them what they thought about test-optional and test-free admission policies.  This is more a testing of the waters of those interested enough and motivated enough to respond. So, before the fans of tests (who can do their own testing of the water at any time, of course), point this out, file this under "interesting, but not definitive."  It might drive discussions, but it won't make a decision for us.  And it shouldn't for you, either. We received about 440 responses, mostly responding to an email we sent to high school counselors across the country.  Those responses came from all over, including some from schools that had probably never sent an applicant, let alone an enrolling student to OSU; but we can't be sure because the survey was anonymous.  But we received almost as many responses from Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey as we did from Oregon, i...