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Freshman Wanderlust

When freshmen students go to college outside their home state, where do they go? It's a question with lots of answers, and the insight is not always easy to figure out, let alone communicate. But I took a stab at it anyway.

There are three views here, using the tabs across the top: If you want to know where students from a particular state enroll out-of-state, you should use the default view: When Freshmen Cross State Lines, Where Do They Go?  Pick any freshman home state (the view shows Michigan to start). You can also limit the colleges displayed by filtering on college region or Carnegie Classification. You can see that 372 freshmen left Michigan to go to The University of Toledo in 2012; 117 went to my institution, DePaul. Note that IPEDS data sometimes has mistakes (choose Arkansas, and you'll see one jump right out at you.** See note below for an update.) But overall, this data looks pretty clean.

If you want to see which colleges enrolled students from specific regions, use the second tab. Again, limit your selections as you wish by using the filters.

Finally, the third tab shows colleges by in-state freshmen, out-of-state freshmen, and percent out-of-state, all colored by the percent out of state. You can sort the institutions by the values in any column, by hovering over the x-axis label and clicking on the little bar icon that pops up. Subsequent clicks resort descending, ascending, and alphabetical. You won't break anything. Click away.

If you're a counselor looking for geographic diversity, this can be helpful. I found lots of interesting stuff that I can use tomorrow as we think about recruiting. What did you see?

**Note: I looked at the data and figured out that Harvard having 226 students from Arkansas was pretty unlikely, as was Harvard having zero students from California, so I took a leap and figured someone typed the data in the wrong box.  It's fixed now.  I also added a map where you can see the number of imports to any college from out of state by choosing the dropdown box on the fourth vis, the map.

** Note Two: I've added two more views, to the right: A bubble chart and a "Percent from out-of-state" chart.

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