Skip to main content

Tuition, Net Price, and Aid

Here's one that's a little more complicated, so I'll give you a head start on how to look at this data.

This shows a lot of data from IPEDS 2011: Sticker costs, and net cost by parental income (3 groups) on the top, and information about financial aid on the bottom, including the percentage of students on Pell Grants, the percentage of students with any aid, loans, or grants.

I've started with the view of the universe: About 1,450 Colleges and Universities that are at the Carnegie Classification of Baccalaureate or above.

Your first move is to look at the data as a pattern, noticing the red squares on top, and the blue and gold squares on the bottom.  They show sticker tuition, the percentage of students with Pell Grants, and the percentage of students with any financial aid.  Got it?

Now, under "Selectivity" choose "Most Selective" and watch what happens.  Maybe the opposite of what you think might: As costs go up, net prices go down for poor kids (on the top) at these institutions.  But on the bottom, you see that colleges with higher sticker costs have fewer students getting any aid; and although many of these places say they meet full demonstrated need, they have far fewer students on Pell Grants.

Go ahead and play with this a bit.  Hover over squares to see details; select and filter to your heart's content.




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Highly Rejective Colleges

If you're not following Akil Bello on Twitter, you should be.  His timeline is filled with great insights about standardized testing, and he takes great effort to point out racism (both subtle and not-so-subtle) in higher education, all while throwing in references to the Knicks and his daughter Enid, making the experience interesting, compelling, and sometimes, fun. Recently, he created the term " highly rejective colleges " as a more apt description for what are otherwise called "highly selective colleges."  As I've said before, a college that admits 15% of applicants really has a rejections office, not an admissions office.  The term appears to have taken off on Twitter, and I hope it will stick. So I took a look at the highly rejectives (really, that's all I'm going to call them from now on) and found some interesting patterns in the data. Take a look:  The 1,132 four-year, private colleges and universities with admissions data in IPEDS are incl

The College Finder

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 Great Lakes region,

Freshman Migration, 1986 to 2020

(Note: I discovered that in IPEDS, Penn State Main Campus now reports with "The Pennsylvania State University" as one system.  So when you'd look at things over time, Penn State would have data until 2018, and then The Penn....etc would show up in 2020.  I found out Penn State main campus still reports its own data on the website, so I went there, and edited the IPEDS data by hand.  So if you noticed that error, it should be corrected now, but I'm not sure what I'll do in years going forward.) Freshman migration to and from the states is always a favorite visualization of mine, both because I find it a compelling and interesting topic, and because I had a few breakthroughs with calculated variables the first time I tried to do it. If you're a loyal reader, you know what this shows: The number of freshman and their movement between the states.  And if you're a loyal viewer and you use this for your work in your business, please consider supporting the costs