A commonly used metric for measuring college costs, drawn from data in the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), is expenditure per full-time equivalent (FTE) student. This article discusses an error in this per FTE calculation when using IPEDS data, especially with regard to community colleges. The problem is that expenditures…

The Fall 2024 Enrollment Fact Book details current fall enrollment data including on- and off-campus enrollment by ethnicity, gender, residency, degree program level, and program category.

The authors generated data visualizations to compare sections of the library book collection, expenditures in those areas, student enrollment in majors and minors, and number of courses. The visualizations resulting from the entered data provide an excellent starting point for conversations about possible imbalances in the collection and point to…

Increased federal attention to student completion metrics and uncertain financial forecasts have heightened the tenor of student retention conversations. Improved institutional retention rates will lead to higher completion rates and relieve some funding concerns. To accomplish these improvements, institutions have invested in analytics to better…

This paper explores how factors operating at the state and community levels are associated with the prevalence of late school enrolment in Nigeria. We investigate the following three research themes. First, whether late entry varies across states and across communities and how much of this variation can be explained by the composition of…

The publication of this report marks the 65th anniversary of "Brown v. Board of Education," the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case declaring racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. In the immediate years after the "Brown" ruling, the effort to integrate schools faced many difficult challenges and progress was…

This descriptive study utilized a validated questionnaire that gathered data from freshmen of two different school years. Demographic profile, marketers (i.e., source of information of students about the school), influencers (i.e., significant others that persuaded them to enroll in the school), level of school choice, and level of consideration…

This study gathered, analyzed, and compared perspectives of students who were honors-eligible but never began the program, students who began in honors and discontinued their enrollment, and those who were persisting in honors. Broadly speaking (and not surprisingly), the responses of students persisting in honors reflected the most positive…

"The State of Preschool 2017" is the 15th edition of the National Institute for Early Education Research's (NIEER) annual report tracking state-funded preschool access, resources, and quality. Since 2002, many states have made progress, a few have fallen behind, and a handful have emerged as leaders. As a result, disparities in access to…

In this paper we consider discrimination-aware classification of educational data. Mining and using rules that distinguish groups of students based on sensitive attributes such as gender and nationality may lead to discrimination. It is desirable to keep the sensitive attributes during the training of a classifier to avoid information loss but…

Including all children in large-scale educational studies is a pressing concern. Omitting certain types of children from studies can lead to skewed findings that promote inaccuracies about learning levels or educational quality. Increasingly, assessments are a method for investigating the quality of education systems, but national assessments are…

"The State of Preschool 2016" is the latest edition of our annual yearbook report profiling state-funded prekindergarten programs in the United States. NIEER's [National Institute for Early Education Research's] "State Preschool Yearbook" is the only national report on state-funded preschool programs with detailed information…

Community colleges enrolled 37 percent of students attending Title IV-eligible, degree-granting institutions in 2000, but by 2012, this had dropped to 33 percent (National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 2013). At least some of this decline is hypothesized to be due to the rise of for-profit institutions, which enrolled approximately 9…

California's alternative education options for youth vulnerable to dropping out of school have been established at different historical points and for different student age and target populations. For purposes of this brief, "alternative school" is defined as belonging to one of six legislatively authorized types of public (non-charter)…

Enrollment is rising across the nation's community colleges, but completion rates remain untenably low. Reformers are focusing on the importance of using comprehensive, high-quality data on student progress and completion to bring about change. A core tenet of Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count has been to embed a culture of…