There were approximately 18.58 million college students in the U.S. in 2022, with around 13.49 million enrolled in public colleges and a further 5.09 million students enrolled in private colleges. The figures are projected to remain relatively constant over the next few years.

What is the most expensive college in the U.S.? The overall number of higher education institutions in the U.S. totals around 4,000, and California is the state with the most. One important factor that students – and their parents – must consider before choosing a college is cost. With annual expenses totaling almost 78,000 U.S. dollars, Harvey Mudd College in California was the most expensive college for the 2021-2022 academic year. There are three major costs of college: tuition, room, and board. The difference in on-campus and off-campus accommodation costs is often negligible, but they can change greatly depending on the college town.

The differences between public and private colleges Public colleges, also called state colleges, are mostly funded by state governments. Private colleges, on the other hand, are not funded by the government but by private donors and endowments. Typically, private institutions are  much more expensive. Public colleges tend to offer different tuition fees for students based on whether they live in-state or out-of-state, while private colleges have the same tuition cost for every student.

We know that students at elite universities tend to be from high-income families, and that graduates are more likely to end up in high-status or high-income jobs. But very little public data has been available on university admissions practices. This dataset, collected by Opportunity Insights, gives extensive detail on college application and admission rates for 139 colleges and universities across the United States, including data on the incomes of students. How do admissions practices vary by institution, and are wealthy students overrepresented?

Motivation

Education equality is one of the most contested topics in society today. It can be defined and explored in many ways, from accessible education to disabled/low-income/rural students to the cross-generational influence of doctorate degrees and tenure track positions. One aspect of equality is the institutions students attend. Consider the “Ivy Plus” universities, which are all eight Ivy League schools plus MIT, Stanford, Duke, and Chicago. Although less than half of one percent of Americans attend Ivy-Plus colleges, they account for more than 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs, a quarter of U.S. Senators, half of all Rhodes scholars, and three-fourths of Supreme Court justices appointed in the last half-century.

A 2023 study (Chetty et al, 2023) tried to understand how these elite institutions affect educational equality:

Do highly selective private colleges amplify the persistence of privilege across generations by taking students from high-income families and helping them obtain high-status, high-paying leadership positions? Conversely, to what extent could such colleges diversify the socioeconomic backgrounds of society’s leaders by changing their admissions policies?

To answer these questions, they assembled a dataset documenting the admission and attendance rate for 13 different income bins for 139 selective universities around the country. They were able to access and link not only student SAT/ACT scores and high school grades, but also parents’ income through their tax records, students’ post-college graduate school enrollment or employment (including earnings, employers, and occupations), and also for some selected colleges, their internal admission ratings for each student. This dataset covers students in the entering classes of 2010–2015, or roughly 2.4 million domestic students.

They found that children from families in the top 1% (by income) are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores, and two-thirds of this gap can be attributed to higher admission rates with similar scores, with the remaining third due to the differences in rates of application and matriculation (enrollment conditional on admission). This is not a shocking conclusion, but we can further explore elite college admissions by socioeconomic status to understand the differences between elite private colleges and public flagships admission practices, and to reflect on the privilege we have here and to envision what a fairer higher education system could look like.

Data

The data has been aggregated by university and by parental income level, grouped into 13 income brackets. The income brackets are grouped by percentile relative to the US national income distribution, so for instance the 75.0 bin represents parents whose incomes are between the 70th and 80th percentile. The top two bins overlap: the 99.4 bin represents parents between the 99 and 99.9th percentiles, while the 99.5 bin represents parents in the top 1%.

Each row represents students’ admission and matriculation outcomes from one income bracket at a given university. There are 139 colleges covered in this dataset.

The variables include an array of different college-level-income-binned estimates for things including attendance rate (both raw and reweighted by SAT/ACT scores), application rate, and relative attendance rate conditional on application, also with respect to specific test score bands for each college and in/out-of state. Colleges are categorized into six tiers: Ivy Plus, other elite schools (public and private), highly selective public/private, and selective public/private, with selectivity generally in descending order. It also notes whether a college is public and/or flagship, where “flagship” means public flagship universities. Furthermore, they also report the relative application rate for each income bin within specific test bands, which are 50-point bands that had the most attendees in each school tier/category.

Several values are reported in “test-score-reweighted” form. These values control for SAT score: they are calculated separately for each SAT score value, then averaged with weights based on the distribution of SAT scores at the institution.

Note that since private schools typically don’t differentiate between in-...

This repository contains datasets and analysis code accompanying the paper "An Empirical Evaluation of Chinese College Admissions Reforms Through A Natural Experiment" by Chen, Jiang, and Kesten. The datasets contain the college admission data for a county in China's Sichuan Province for year 2008 and 2009. These include students' submitted rank-ordered lists of colleges and admission results. All variables are recoded to remove any identifiable information (including college and high school code). The analysis code can be used to replicate the tables and figures in the paper.

College admissions is a competitive game. Few schools are as competitive as Yale University. Located in New Haven, CT, Yale College's most recent acceptance rate was in the low single digits. This raises two questions: How many applicants will be admitted going forward? What does it take to get into Yale?

This starter data set is a compilation of data made public by Yale's Office of Institutional Research. While the data are well suited to answering the first of our two research questions, additional variables are required to offer a credible answer to the second. Additional data are, thus, welcome.

In the academic year of 2023/24, around 21 million students were enrolled for undergraduate degrees in the United States. This was a slight increase from the previous year, when 20.6 million students were enrolled as undergraduates.

The data here is from the report entitled Trends in Enrollment, Credit Attainment, and Remediation at Connecticut Public Universities and Community Colleges: Results from P20WIN for the High School Graduating Classes of 2010 through 2016.

The report answers three questions: 1. Enrollment: What percentage of the graduating class enrolled in a Connecticut public university or community college (UCONN, the four Connecticut State Universities, and 12 Connecticut community colleges) within 16 months of graduation? 2. Credit Attainment: What percentage of those who enrolled in a Connecticut public university or community college within 16 months of graduation earned at least one year’s worth of credits (24 or more) within two years of enrollment? 3. Remediation: What percentage of those who enrolled in one of the four Connecticut State Universities or one of the 12 community colleges within 16 months of graduation took a remedial course within two years of enrollment?

Notes on the data: School Credit: % Earning 24 Credits is a subset of the % Enrolled in 16 Months. School Remediation: % Enrolled in Remediation is a subset of the % Enrolled in 16 Months.

The data file (SPSS file) contains data compiled from Peterson's Guide in spring 2014 about college applications, including college name, number of applicants (male and female), acceptance rate, the college's national ranking, and the college's student body size. The dataset is part of a project on gender and competition.

As of February 1, ********* applications were submitted to the most selective higher education institutions, who admit less than 25 percent of their applicants, during the 2023/24 academic year in the United States. In comparison, only ******* applications had been submitted to highly selective institutions who admit between 25 and 49 percent of their applicants.

This paper examines if students' college outcomes are sensitive to access to college admissions tests. I construct a dataset of every test center location and district policy in the United States linked to the universe of individual testing records and a large sample of college enrollment records. I find evidence that SAT taking is responsive to the opening or closing of a testing center at a student's own or a neighboring high school and to policies that provide free in-school administration and default registration. Newly induced takers of high academic aptitude appear likely to attend and graduate from college. (JEL H75, I23, I28)

In 2022, about **** million male students were enrolled in degree-granting postsecondary institutions as undergraduates. This is compared to **** million female undergraduate students who were enrolled in that same year. By 2031, these figures are projected to increase to **** million and *** million respectively.

In 2029, the projected number of White high school students enrolled in four-year colleges in the United States was around *********, a decrease when compared to ********* in 2019. For Hispanic high school students, however, the projected number of those enrolled in college in 2029 was approximately *******, an increase from ******* in 2019.

Dataset

This dataset was created by Anup Pandey

Contents

Financial overview and grant giving statistics of National Association For College Admission Counseling

Graph and download economic data for Expenditures: Entertainment: Fees and Admissions by Highest Education: Less Than College Graduate: Total (CXUFEESADMLB1402M) from 2012 to 2023 about no college, admissions, entertainment, fees, secondary schooling, secondary, education, expenditures, and USA.

Montgomery College Student Enrollment Data Update Frequency: Annually

Graph and download economic data for Expenditures: Entertainment: Fees and Admissions by Education: Less Than High School Graduate (CXUFEESADMLB1303M) from 1995 to 2012 about no college, admissions, entertainment, fees, secondary schooling, secondary, education, expenditures, and USA.

The Higher Education General Information Survey (HEGIS) series was designed to provide comprehensive information on various aspects of postsecondary education in the United States and its territories (American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and the Marshall Islands) and Department of Defense schools outside the United States. Data are available for both public and private two-year and four-year institutions. The HEGIS Fall Enrollment component for 1968 sought enrollment data from institutions of higher education. Key data elements, presented for up to five record types for each institution, include total enrollments of full-time and part-time students by class level, sex, race, and first-time enrollment status, as well as information on the institutions' type of accreditation, type of calendar system, and total number of students.

In 2020, ** percent of high school graduates from families in the lowest income quartile in the United States enrolled in college. This was a decrease of *** percent from the previous year.

Background and Objective: Every year thousands of applications are being submitted by international students for admission in colleges of the USA. It becomes an iterative task for the Education Department to know the total number of applications received and then compare that data with the total number of applications successfully accepted and visas processed. Hence to make the entire process easy, the education department in the US analyze the factors that influence the admission of a student into colleges. The objective of this exercise is to analyse the same.

Domain: Education

Dataset Description:

Attribute Description GRE Graduate Record Exam Scores GPA Grade Point Average Rank It refers to the prestige of the undergraduate institution. The variable rank takes on the values 1 through 4. Institutions with a rank of 1 have the highest prestige, while those with a rank of 4 have the lowest. Admit It is a response variable; admit/don’t admit is a binary variable where 1 indicates that student is admitted and 0 indicates that student is not admitted. SES SES refers to socioeconomic status: 1 - low, 2 - medium, 3 - high. Gender_male Gender_male (0, 1) = 0 -> Female, 1 -> Male Race Race – 1, 2, and 3 represent Hispanic, Asian, and African-Americ