This was done over a break in summer 2022 while starting to take my kids on college visits, then updated over winter break 2022-3 and tweaked to update with new data; as I mention on the home page, while there are lots of “College Ranking” websites, they use some odd factors to rank (such as college administrators ranking each other, standardized testing scores, how many students they reject, and more for US News and World Report) while omitting things like tenure track faculty numbers, library resources, climate, and whether the state safe for LGBTQ+ students. The US federal data have information on lots of schools: I chose to present info on all the schools that are still open rather than filter for the schools just of interest to my family (my kids are not going to seminary for a Masters degree or to a school for funeral service directors any time soon, but this might be of interest to students, staff, or faculty considering those schools, so I am including them). Some schools, especially smaller ones (some have just a few dozen students) do not include all information and so these school pages might be sparse.
While I’m sure there are ways it can be improved, it’s impressive considering it’s one person making it in his free time (while apparently helping his own kids as they look into colleges!). Wanted to pass it along in case it was helpful to folks here.
Thank you so much for posting this. It’s really quite interesting. I’ll have to dig in more, but a few of the things I found particularly noteworthy were:
Student to tenure-stream faculty ratio (in addition to regular student to faculty ratio)
Percentage of undergrads registered as having disabilities
The notes that sometimes make comments about whether a school has been running a deficit or talks about the enrollment declines over time (or whether California considers the state to have anti-LGBTQ laws and won’t fund travel there)
I’m definitely interested in exploring the site more!
ETA: I also found it very interesting to see which institutions it matches up as “Similar Institutions”
This is using information about school size, acceptance rate, yield rate, graduation rate, cost, athletic conference, and similar metrics, but it can miss important axes of similarity (for example, culinary versus hair styling schools).
So it was interesting seeing how some of my state’s schools (which get few mentions on CC) have been mentioned as similar to some other schools that get more mentions on CC. For instance, when one of our state schools is compared to U. Mass - Lowell or UNC-Charlotte, it helps put that state school in some additional context as well as those other out-of-state schools.
I don’t do Reddit, but I totally agree with this. Last night I kept looking at the library statistics of the colleges that would indicate the number of resources checked out per student (hard copies and electronic copies). A lot of interesting conjectures could be made based on those data points!
I really liked @AustenNut’s post a few days ago (here) in the “Rest in Peace - College Closings” thread, pointing out how the data can indicate the ongoing viability of small colleges. I have a secret hope that — with the 2025 cliff looming — small colleges that aren’t viable will turn into residential living-learning retirement communities for aging Gen X folks, and was looking around at schools that might fit in that category. Sure enough, two of the ones that seemed like promising candidates for that have recently announced that they’re ceasing operations. Sierra Nevada College (CollegeTables page) was looking not-great, and — according to its homepage — was acquired by the University of Nevada, Reno last year. Another, Holy Names University (CollegeTables page) announced a few months back that they’ll cease operations after this year.
Unfortunately, I’m not in a place to actually acquire one of these schools to turn it into a retirement campus, but the data’s certainly interesting to pore through!
Both of those schools had really interesting trend lines. Sierra Nevada generally managed to keep itself in the black between 2011-2021, though its enrollment was quite small and decreasing. Holy Names was in the red for many of those years, but its assets were increasing at a pace of about $6.8M/year. I wonder if that was the value of its real estate that was increasing being as the bay area is in such high-demand, but wasn’t anything that could be actually liquidated to use to run the school.
If you look for places in less desirable locations, you might get a better price than in the bay area or Lake Tahoe.
