I speak in my daily life about numbers, about the power of numbers, about interpreting numbers, and about the power of graphs and charts to let us really “see” what the numbers are saying. I draw upon experts such as Edward Tufte, Cole Nusbaumer Knaflic, Nathan Yau, Alberto Cairo, and Steven Few, among others to… Read More
“Water, Water Everywhere, Nor Any Drop to Drink”
When the topic is data, today’s CEOs are apparently feeling much the same about it as the sailor immortalized in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” felt about water. In the 2019 PwC Annual Global CEO Survey, CEOs were quite clear about how dissatisfied they are with how data is used in their… Read More
Fall 2019 Enrollment Estimates from the Clearinghouse: New Hampshire Sees YoY Increase
The National Student Clearinghouse’s Research Center has just released the Fall 2019 estimated U.S. enrollments in postsecondary education, and for the nation as a whole, the news isn’t good. The NSC estimates that enrollment has decreased 1.3% from last year. Since the NSC began producing this analysis in 2012, enrollments have dropped each year. In… Read More
ROI for New Hampshire’s Institutions
Last month, the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce released, “A First Try at ROI,” a thorough report that aims to evaluate the Return on Investment (ROI) for a student attending any particular college in the U.S. The scope of the project is quite impressive: taking the government’s College Scorecard data, the Georgetown team… Read More
Marlboro College (VT) Closing Down, In Three (or so) Pictures
I woke up this morning to the news that another small, liberal arts-focused college in the Northeast is closing at the end of this academic year. Marlboro College (VT) will become the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. It joins 3 other Vermont colleges that have announced closures in the… Read More
UPDATE: “Heart of Detroit” Tuition Pledge
In July we documented the impact of the “Kalamazoo Promise” program. Begun in 2006, this program covers 100% of the cost of tuition at selected colleges in Michigan for any student who graduated from the Kalamazoo public schools. Now Wayne State University has announced a similar program, the Heart of Detroit Tuition Pledge. Detroit residents… Read More
Class Size Influences Womens’ Success in STEM
The latest research study by Cissy Ballen et. al. and published in BioScience investigates the factors that influence the performance gap we see in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) classes between men and women. The culprit? A metric that’s common at colleges and universities: class size. Previous research shows that women participate less than… Read More
Peeling Back the Layers of the Onion
With the price of a college education climbing more each year, there are quite a lot of ideas being thrown around for how to make it affordable. Loan forgiveness, increasing access to loans, and free college for all are just a few of the suggestions we’ve seen. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal… Read More
Is It Worth It?
This time of year is one for families and their college students to reflect on their journey, and increasingly on how much that journey has cost. According to the College Board’s annual survey of college costs, in AY2018/19, published tuition and fees for private institutions was $35,830; for publics, $10,230. This doesn’t include Room and… Read More