I've written a lot about yield rates over time, and I've also written about differences in admission patterns among male and female applicants here and here; I've decided to take a fresh look at both based on some continuing discussions I've heard recently.  You have, of course, heard about the crisis of male enrollment in American colleges, which, if you look at the data, is really a crisis of enrollment at Community Colleges.  Far be it from me to insist on data, however. Here is the same data for women, just to point out that there are differences.  Whether we should celebr ..read more

Used to be, with a little work, you could download very detailed data on AP results from the College Board website: For every state, and for every course, you could see performance by ethnicity.  And, if you wanted to dig really deep, you could break out details by private and public schools, and by grade level.  I used to publish the data every couple of years. Those days are gone.  The transparency The College Board touts as a value seems to have its limits, and I understand this to some extent: Racists loved to twist the data using single-factor analysis, and that's not good ..read more

Last night, I looked at a chart that had been tweeted out by Marco Learning, a terrific source for information about The College Board's AP Program.  It showed the percentage of all scores graded 4 and 5 over time by subject, and there were some glaring points: Lots of big increases in certain subjects that didn't seem to make sense.  Turns out, their data was correct. Wanting to dive down a little deeper, I went to the College Board website to look at the data myself, and to "download" it for some additional analysis.  I put the word download in quotation marks on purpose. I ha ..read more

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 p ..read more

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 an 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.&nb ..read more

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 ..read more

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 infor ..read more

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 ..read more

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 coul ..read more

 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 Universi ..read more