According to the U.S. Department of Education, the Perkins Loan program “provides lowinterest [sic] loans to help needy students finance the costs of postsecondary education.” Pell grants target needy students as well, so the chart below shows the number of students receiving Perkins loans and the number of students receiving Pell grants at a sample of colleges.

The blue line shoContinue Reading »

A few commenters asked for institutional aid/net tuition maps. Since net tuition (tuition minus grant aid) includes institutional aid/grants, I will focus on net tuition in this post. The one caveat is that per-student aid data is only available for “full-time, first-time degree/certificate-seeking undergraduates,” meaning that this is really an estimate of net tuition for those students. It isContinue Reading »

Recent commenters have asked for maps showing graduation rates and enrollment. Ask and ye shall receive.

The first map below shows each state’s average four-year graduation rate (enrollment-weighted, meaning schools with only a few students don’t skew the average). Nevada, New Mexico, and Alaska (not shown) have enrollment-weighted, four-year graduation rates of less than 15 percent, whiContinue Reading »

One of the comments on last week’s post asked for a map of tuition. Below are maps of the enrollment-weighted, average tuition by state for (1) all colleges, (2) four-year colleges, and (3) two-year colleges.

There is a lot of interesting information buried in these maps, but three things jumped out at me.

First, tuition tends to be highest inContinue Reading »

This week’s Higher Ed Data Central post showcases a new capability: mapping. The map below shows the location of every college and university in the continental United States.

We can also look at just those colleges that meet certain criteria for a specific state or region. For example, below is a map showing the location of every public college in California.

So lContinue Reading »

My last post looked at where students cluster and found that students congregate at lower-cost colleges. In the comments, Les Schmidt asked about whether this was a new phenomenon or if this is just the way it’s always been. We looked into that question by plotting tuition (in inflation-adjusted 2012 dollars) and enrollment (total full-time equivalent) in five-year increments for both public, fContinue Reading »

One of the key points from Caroline M. Hoxby and Christopher Avery’s new paper, The Missing “One-Offs”: The Hidden Supply of High-Achieving, Low Income Students, is that there are many high-achieving, low-income students that are not currently attending selective institutions. This is all the more surprising because many private, nonprofit colleges claim that by charging high tuitioContinue Reading »

A few weeks ago, we noticed some evidence that students are shifting their enrollment to lower-cost institutions. This got us thinking about how to explore where students choose to attend college, and we thought this chart was probably the most revealing. It simply shows tuition vs. net tuition, with the size of each dot being proportional to total enrollment at the college (bigger dot = more sContinue Reading »

Last week, I pointed out that when adjusting for inflation, using a general price index—such as the Consumer Price Index (CPI)—is a much better measure than using a sector-specific price index—such as the Higher Education Cost Adjustment (HECA)—since the HECA overestimates the true rate of inflation. Afterwards, Kevin Carey suggested that I redo the infamous SHEEO chart (which uses HECA), showiContinue Reading »

As a country, we have (rightly) decided that we want to subsidize education. But does it matter whether we give the money to students to spend or directly to colleges? Yes.

Most of the incentives in the current system encourage a college to spend as much money as possible to try and become a “better” version of itself. To the extent that the methods of becoming “better” are in conflict wContinue Reading »