Busy weeks at work, and I’m like, “why are there like a 100 new messages in that thread?” Congrats on all your kids’ scores!
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Visited Wheaton College today. It has such a beautiful campus. I think it’s the prettiest we’ve seen so far. The kids were all very nice. The dorm was a decent size. The admission presentation was pretty lacking. We had a nice long tour but it didn’t go in depth really. It was probably something similar to what you’d get at a big university, mostly the outside of buildings or standing in the lobby. We’re used to pretty in-depth tours showing the labs and things. After the tour we went to chapel and then a short admission presentation with information mostly found online already. There was no question-and-answer session with the students like the other colleges we’ve visited. It was almost like they weren’t even trying.
The worst part was the cafeteria food. The building was beautiful and open concept, but the food was just not good. It was the worst food we’ve had which we found comical because the tour guide was raving about how it is the top 50 of the US for food.
D25 says she still wants to apply but I doubt she’ll end up there. It will also most likely be out of our price range since the highest scholarship they give is $20K and it’s over $57k to attend. Gotta love being a donut hole family.
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Just wanted to share that S has gone from a B average to A+ so far this year with a rigorous course load. I don’t know what happened, other than general maturity/frontal lobe development and starting to understand how grades impact your future. He is a recruited athlete and one of the coaches at a very selective college told him he had to get his grades up before he would be considered. Perhaps that had something to do with it. He is a super bright kid but just didn’t care before. Hope he stays on the right track!
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Why the {insert bad word of choice here} is it so difficult to impossible to find enrollment trends over time for colleges? Anybody know of a place I could find those? (Bonus points for datasets that go back a few years before covid.)
What king of enrollment data?
I presume you’re looking for data not included in the common data set?
Like I said: Enrollment trends over time.
I would like to see, for any given college, what their enrollments were each year for, say, the past 10 years.
These numbers are out there, but gathering them would be a painful slog through old IPEDS reports, and done separately for every college I’m interested in looking up.
I am just surprised that nobody with better understanding of data scraping techniques than me appears to have done this, or if they have done so that it’s so impossible to find.
And it is still unclear.
Are you interested in yield? Geographical profile? ED/RD? What kind of trend?
Enrollment.
Just enrollment. Seriously, there is no other way to phrase this.
Like, if you google “Harvard University enrollment” you get 22,947.
That, but for the past 10ish years, all in one place.
Do you mean total number enrolled at the undergraduate level?
I’m not picky between undergrad or total enrollments.
(Which are available from CDS reports, sure, but sifting through all of them for a large or even small but not tiny number of colleges isn’t really feasible for a single human being to do.)
I still don’t know what you are after.
In a perfect world, what I would have would be a database in which I could like up a college and find their enrollment numbers for the past N years.
Like this sort of resource (a CHE database of what colleges have stated their peers to be) but for historical enrollment numbers.
ETA: But the crucial thing is that it would be by college, not aggregated numbers.
Probably relevant for some people, but the colleges discussed here seem to be fully enroll every year. Say such data were available, why are you interested in it? what are you trying to assess?
I’m not sure that we can say that the colleges widely discussed on CC fully enroll each year—see the annual discussion of the NACAC vacancies list. (Also, what counts as fully enrolled? That changes over time, too.)
And I am interested in it mainly but not exclusively as an indirect measure of fiscal health—most of the college failures over the past several years have been preceded by multi-year enrollment declines. My kid isn’t interested in the HYPSMs/WASPs of the higher-ed world, so it’s important.
Not to mention that as someone employed in the higher education sector, it’s simply professionally interesting.
If you haven’t seen this before, Forbes gives colleges an annual financial grade that has proved accurate.
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Yeah, I already know that one. (I have some issues with their methodology—they’ve had some hits and misses over the years.)
But the data it (and other similar ones) is built on is so deeply hidden—why can’t the raw data be available to ordinary people?
Hi everybody! I’m a little late to the party in this thread but my oldest is D25 (also have D27) so we are really beginning to focus on the college search and process. I don’t many close friends with older kids so I’m really glad to have found this site to vet things through - a lot has changed since I went to college! Schools that D25 is most interested in are the better/bigger schools out west. UW, Oregon State, U Oregon, U Colorado Boulder. We are from AZ and she’s planning to flee the desert so no ASU or UofA (sad for my wallet and proximity of kid). Happy to meet you all virtually!
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Welcome! D25 has UW, UO, and Boulder on her long list. We’re in California, but she likes the PNW weather, so I understand the appeal. I am not thrilled about out-of-state tuition or kid being a plane ride away, but I’m just trying to find options that she doesn’t nope away at this point that she has some chance of getting into.
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Double posting because we’re going to visit family in the PNW and looking to tour UO and UW. UO has sparse options. UW is scheduling out to mid-March 2024 with dates over breaks and everything. Like a machine!
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