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It's been said the Internet is like a party: You don't have to announce that you're leaving. But this will be the final post on Higher Ed Data Stories. After 4,183 days, it's time to call it quits. To save myself the time necessary to reply to both of you who are still faithfully reading these posts, I feel compelled to offer a few words of explanation. First, of course, is that I'm retiring from…
I've been fascinated for a while by the connection between political leanings and education: The correlation is so strong that I once suggested that perhaps Republicans were so anti-education because, in general, places with a higher percentage of bachelor's degree recipients were more likely to vote for Democrats. The 2024 presidential election puzzled a lot of us in higher education, and perhaps…
I'm not sure where to begin on this one, so let's veer off topic a bit. I've decided I'll likely be phasing out Higher Ed Data Stories in the near future as I go into retirement and start my new venture , which is soft launched but not officially open for business. When I do, I'll be posting regularly on my blog over there , but won't be putting everything out on the web for free, as I've been…
Attainment has always been an interesting topic for me, every since I first got stunned into disbelief when I looked at the data over time. Even looking at shorter periods can lead to some revelations that many don't make sense at first. Here is the latest data from NCES, published in the Digest of Education Statistics . Please note that this is for informational purposes only, and I've not even…
This now-annual post is one that boggles and befuddles people, especially those who think that your yield rate is something you control by flipping switches. In reality, yield rate is controlled by something much more powerful: Algebra. First, let's review what yield rate is: Colleges get applications, and they admit a certain percentage of them. In aggregate colleges admit the vast majority of…
This is a popular post each year with high school and independent counselors working with students who are already thinking about a doctorate. It shows the undergraduate institutions of doctoral recipients from 1958 to 2023. (It does not show where the doctorate was earned, to be clear.) It's based on data I downloaded from the National Science Foundation using their custom tool . It's a little…
The cost of college has been a hot topic for a while now, and even though some studies suggest the net cost of college has been falling post-COVID, it's clear that sticker prices have not been. And because the overwhelming majority of college and university students in the US attend public institutions, that's a good place to start the discussion. This is data from IPEDS, showing published cost…
A while ago, I made the claim that Oregon State University has the longest streak of consecutive years of fall-over-fall enrollment growth of any public, Research 1 university in America. A few people have asked me, not exactly doubting the claim, but thinking maybe I had made a mistake, for the source of it. This started as a curiosity: I knew from our own internal documentation that the last…
Graduation rates are always a hot topic in higher education, but often for the wrong reason. To demonstrate, I offer my parents. Here is a portrait of Agnes and Mark, married May 4, 1946. One night while I was talking to my brother, he asked, "Do you think mom was the way she was because dad was the way he was, or do you think dad was the way he was because mom was the way she was?" To which I…
Good news: We have new IPEDS data on average net cost. Bad news: Because IPEDS is IPEDS, it's data from the 2021-22 Academic Year. This is pretty straightforward: Each dot represents a public institution, colored by region, showing the average net price for first-year students entering in that year. IPEDS breaks out average net price by income bands, so you can see what a family with income of…
