Higher Ed Data Stories

OK, I admit it.  That headline is clickbait.  I have no idea which colleges might close in the near future, but I want to take a look at the problem from 30,000 feet. This is prompted by the recent announcement that Eastern Nazarene College in Massachusetts will close . It comes on the heels of several other announcements like this over the past few years.  And of course, because we've become accustomed to colleges surviving for long periods even during bad times, the surprise makes people wonder who's next. The meta-answer will surprise you: While we of course feel bad for the people who lose jobs, the students who are displaced, and the community that finds itself dealing with the loss of a respected institution, these trends are small blips in the industry.  In fact, the institutions most likely to close (probably) collectively account for a small fraction of enrollment at America's colleges and universities. Follow along.   One of the challenges in talk...

This is a reboot of a visualization I did in 2018, which I found fascinating, but which didn't get much traffic at the time, and thus, I've not refreshed it.  But I still find it compelling and instructive. Each year, the Association of American Medical Colleges publishes a lot of data about admission to medical colleges in the US. But frankly, it's a mess, and takes a lot of effort to clean up and visualize: Each link is a separate spreadsheet, and each spreadsheet has spacer rows and merged cells and lots of stuff that needs to be scrubbed (carefully) before analyzing and visualizing.  So, if you use this work in a professional capacity, I'd appreciate your support for my time, software and hosting costs at this link . As a reminder, I don't accept contributions from high school counselors, students, or parents who are using the site.  (And if you know anyone at AAMC, tell them raw data would be much appreciated). There are seven views here, some of which combine...

This will be the second part of a series of blogposts about how to use IPEDS, The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System of the federal government. If you're just starting, I highly recommend you go to the  first post  to bring yourself up to speed on the basics.  If you don't, some of this might not make sense. In that post, I covered several of the ways you can extract simple tables of data for a single year or a single institution; or summary data, including fairly basic and interactive charts when you're looking for something simple.  In this one, I'll go over how to extract custom data over multiple years, and then walk you through the frustrating process of making sense of the output.  Warning: I get a bit cranky about this, because the data formats are largely unchanged since I started doing this perhaps 20 years ago, and they create far more work for the end user than they should. The last post covered the options in italics.  This one will ...

Most, but not all, of the data visualizations on this site use data from IPEDS , the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.  And all of the visualizations (as I recall) use Tableau , a very powerful data visualization tool, especially for people like me who don't know how to write the code necessary in some software packages. In this post, I'll start with a few of the easiest and quickest ways to get data out of IPEDS.  I'll follow it up with one that dives a little deeper for people who like the raw data for analysis. The question I get asked most often is how I get the information out of IPEDS.  And that's not an easy thing to answer, as I use several of the methods available depending on what I'm doing.  Since you federal tax dollars have not yet been used to create an easy guide to IPEDS, I'm going to give you a primer on how to do the most simple things, and hope you'll do like I did, which is to learn it the hard way through trial and error on...

There has been a lot written about the death of the English degree in higher education.  Is it true? Sort of.  But there are other interesting trends in patterns across the country in the past dozen years.  I downloaded IPEDS data from 2010 to 2022 (even years) and created the visualization to show those changes and patterns in bachelor's degrees awarded.  There are six views, and some of them are interactive. The first (using the tabs across the top) shows degrees by the institutions where they're awarded. You can see the college or university sector, region, urbanicity, and Carnegie classification (rolled up into larger segments for clarity.)  You'll see little change: Most degrees are still awarded by public institutions, doctoral institutions, in larger cities.  Hover for details. Over the years, degrees (in first majors) increased about 29% and the second view allows you to see the changes by area (using 2020 CIP codes that cluster degrees in broad are...

The three answers to the question in the title, in case you want to cut to the chase, are "Yes," "No," and "Maybe but we really can't tell for certain." This has been a point of discussion for some time.  The completely neutral publication Southern Living, with absolutely nothing to gain from publishing this piece, for instance, was convinced it was true back in 2022.  The American Thinker had similar observations, but made it about politics in this piece . And finally, among the articles I've seen, at least, is this one, in The Free Press  where the money quote is "Even if I could have gotten into Harvard, I wouldn't have gone," an observation which seems like it was made for a gif. There are a lot of anecdotes in these articles, of course, and we all know that three anecdotes are more than enough to build a story upon: My lawyer's neighbor's son's girlfriend is going to Alabama because she liked the rush videos , for in...

Two quick additions/clarifications to this:  The definition of full-pays is those students who receive no institutional funds.  EM people don't care where the cash comes from, only the discount.  Second, yes, I know some institutions use endowments to pay for institutional aid.  That percentage is likely very small, although concentrated at a few institutions. Before we begin, here is what this post does not do: It will generally not tell you where you can get low tuition, with a very few exceptions.  And when it does, it won't be at one of "those" colleges. It will not tell you which colleges are likely to close soon, although after the fact, you can probably find a closed college and say, "Aha! Right where I expected it would be!" It will not show you net costs to students. It will not adjust for things like church support, enormous endowments, or the cost of living in that high-priced city where Excellence College or Superior University is located. Got it...

One of the intended consequences of test-optional admission policies at some institutions prior to the COVID-19 pandemic was to raise test scores reported to US News and World Report.  It's rare that you would see a proponent of test-optional admission like me admit that, but to deny it would be foolish. Because I worked at DePaul, which was an early adopter of the approach (at least among large universities), I fielded a lot of calls from colleagues who were considering it, some of whom were explicit in their reasons for doing so.  One person I spoke to came right out at the start of the call: She was only calling, she said, because her provost wanted to know how much they could raise scores if they went test-optional. If I sensed or heard that motivation, I advised people against it.  In those days, the vast majority of students took standardized admission tests like the SAT or ACT, but the percentage of students applying without tests was still relatively small; the ne...

I know I've been barking up the tree of " Graduation Rates are inputs, not outputs " for a long time.  And I know no one is listening.  So I do this, just to show you (without the dependent variable) just how unsurprising they are. Here are four views of graduation rates at America's four-year public and private, not-for-profit colleges and universities. And I've put them in four views, with several different ways to look at the data. The first (using the tabs across the top) shows four-, five-, and six-year graduation rates on the left, and "Chance in four" on the right.  In other words, since everyone pretty much thinks they're going to graduate from the college they enroll in as a freshman, what are the chances of graduating in four years, rather than six?  There are some surprises there, as you'll see. On all the visualizations, you can apply filters to limit the colleges you're looking at.  The scroll bar (to move up or down) is on the r...

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...