What does Illinois get for its MAP Investment?

If you live in Illinois, you should know about the Illinois MAP (Monetary Award Program), which has helped millions of students earn a college degree. And you should know that almost every year, someone suggests that the funding should be removed from private universities, which they apparently think of as bastions of the wealthy.  So, […]

IPEDS 2011

I’ve updated my IPEDS Data Visualization.  I am never completely happy with it, but I think this does a nice a job of showing important information in a concise manner. But it takes a few minutes to learn how to use it. When you click on the link, you’ll go to a page that looks […]

Can SAT Fibbing Make Students Happier?

As I continued to think about the Claremont McKenna “scandal” and the attention it  has received (including, of course, from me), some things occurred to me, not the least of which is my gut instinct that there’s no way this was pulled off by one person acting alone.  Maybe more about that later. But if you’re interested, […]

Catching The Wave

As I did a presentation this morning for the President’s Council (the VP’s, Deans, and other important faculty and administrators at DePaul) on implementation progress of our test-optional pilot program, several things occurred to me:  The whole test-optional discussion nationwide is really less about statistical r-squareds than it is about combating information cascades. But at the same time, […]

Another SAT Scandal

If you’re coming here, you’ve probably already heard that Claremont McKenna College has suffered a bit of a scandal: Dean Richard Vos has resigned after apparently admitting that he reported inflated SAT averages for the incoming freshman class for one or more years.  This is not unprecedented, of course. In the interest of disclosure, I […]

Data Visualization Serendipity

Been meaning to write about this for a while.  Tempus fugit.  With the launch of Tableau 7, now seems to be a good time. While we were doing research on our decision to become the nation’s largest private, not-for-profit university that is test-optional in freshman admission, I was doing some work studying patterns in ACT […]

How Bloomberg Got it Wrong

A recent article in Bloomberg suggests test-optional colleges and universities are talking out of both sides of their mouths because we buy the names of students who take the SAT or ACT. Inflammatory and illogical posts like this are good to drive traffic to your site, but really, doesn’t some editor owe the reading public […]