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 o ..read more

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 othe ..read more

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 ..read more

 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 ..read more

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 ..read more

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 dow ..read more

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.&n ..read more

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 ..read more

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 aw ..read more

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 w ..read more