Tag: Data

I like playing with data to see what I might learn.

For this graph, I looked at data published by the University System of Maryland for the University of Maryland, College Park, about the number of applicants and the acceptance and enrollment rates. This graphic shows only Maryland residents. Looking at it this way, you can see that the number of applicants who applied and weren’t accepted and the number of students who enrolled almost doubled from 2008 to 2023. Almost doubled might be slightly exaggerated, but it is a good way to think about it. I wonder if that is the case for institutions that aren’t the flagship.

More of me playing around with data and publishing it to try to remember what I read. I put these maps on the same scale, with 20% being the lowest and 73% being the highest. Data was not available for Dorchester County.

Disadvantaged Graduates

The map for disadvantaged students’ immediate college enrollment rates from various local school systems in Maryland for the cohort year 2021-22 reveals significant disparities. Among the local school systems, Howard County had the highest enrollment rate at 45%. Following Howard County, Frederick and Harford counties had notable enrollment rates of 38%. On the other end of the spectrum, Worcester County had the lowest enrollment rate at just 20%, with Somerset County close behind at 22%. Larger school systems like Baltimore City and Prince George’s County showed relatively low enrollment rates at 31%. This data highlights the challenges faced by disadvantaged students in accessing higher education immediately after high school graduation, with enrollment rates generally lagging behind those of their non-disadvantaged peers, which is shown below. Overall 34% of disadvantaged graduates enrolled immediately after high school.

NoT disadvantaged Graduates

The map shows the immediate college enrollment rates for high school graduates from various local school systems in Maryland for the cohort year 2021-22, segmented by economic status and focusing on those who are not disadvantaged. Among the local school systems, Howard County had the highest percentage of high school graduates enrolled in college immediately, with a rate of 73%. Montgomery County followed with a 69% enrollment rate. On the other hand, Somerset County exhibited the lowest enrollment rate at 27%, significantly lower than the state average. Other notable observations include the relatively high enrollment rates in Frederick and Harford Counties, both at 61%, and the lower-than-average rates in Prince George's County at 43% and Baltimore City at 45%. Overall, the state average enrollment rate for not disadvantaged students was 58%. This data highlights the disparities in immediate college enrollment rates across different local school systems in Maryland.

Overall OBServations

Overall, the data reflects significant disparities in immediate college enrollment rates across different local school systems and between disadvantaged and not disadvantaged students. Statewide, the enrollment rate for not disadvantaged students was 58%, while disadvantaged students had a lower rate of 34%. Howard and Montgomery Counties consistently showed high enrollment rates for both groups, while Somerset and Worcester Counties showed some of the lowest rates. The substantial gap in enrollment rates between disadvantaged and not disadvantaged students across nearly all local school systems indicates a widespread issue that needs to be addressed to ensure equitable access to higher education opportunities for all students in Maryland.

Statewide of the 2021-2022 cohort, nearly half (49%) of Maryland public high school graduates immediately enrolled in college. Howard County Public Schools had the highest percentage of graduates immediately enrolling in college at 68%. Somerset County Public Schools had the lowest percentage of graduates immediately enrolling in college at 25%.

I have been busy with work, but now I have a pocket of time to dig into reading reports again. So you might see a few posts from me.

The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is the official application for financial assistance for
postsecondary education from the federal government. States, individual colleges and universities, and private scholarship programs use this information as well. Financial aid includes grants, educational loans, and work-study programs.

During the 2023 session, Senator Ellis put in a bill (Senate Bill 127) to require the Maryland Longitudinal Data System (MLDS) Center to report specified student FAFSA data to the Maryland General Assembly. MLDS must disaggregate the information by county and other student subgroups. I wrote the fiscal and policy note for the the bill. The bill was enacted as Chapter 688 of 2023.

FAFSA Completion for Maryland Aid

This first map shows the FAFSA completion rates by high school graduates by February 28, 2022. FAFSAs completed by this date are in time for consideration for the March 1 deadline for Maryland State financial aid. The map shows that Howard County Public School System has the highest FAFSA completion rate, at 57%, while Allegany County Public School System has the lowest, at 30%.

Due to federal data suppression requirements, the U.S. Department of Education does not report some FAFSA submissions and completions at the school level. The total is underreported since these data are used to calculate the overall local school system completion rates.

FAFSA Completion FOr Fall Enrollment

By fall enrollment, high school graduates from Howard County Public School System and Kent County Public School System have the highest FAFSA completion rates at 68%. While Dorchester County Public School System and Washington County Public School System have the the lowest FAFSA completion rates at 47%. Between February and August, the Allegany County Public School System had the highest percentage increase in FAFSAs completed (75%). While Howard County Public Schools, which had the highest FAFSA completion rate in February, had the lowest increase in FAFSAs completed (25%).

The 2024 Session is about to begin, so I am bookmarking data sources I frequently use to write fiscal and policy notes for the Maryland General Assembly. I am doing this to find the sources easily during Session, and I will add sources as I remember them.

Data Sources

In November 2023, the U.S. Department of Education released new data about bachelor’s degree completion rates for transfer students. I have been interested in transfer students for years and it is a topic that I want to better understand. I use this blog to remember the data I read about and capture my initial thoughts. It is also a place for me to explore using data visualization tools.

DYAD

The researchers defined a dyad as a pair of institutions consisting of a public community college and a public or private four-year institution. The data only includes pairs where at least 30 students enrolled in the community college in 2014 and at least 30 students transferred and graduated from the four-year institution in at least 8 years. Nationally they identified 385 dyads, of which 8 were in Maryland.

Success of DYADS

Montgomery College belongs to four of the eight dyads in Maryland, showing that Montgomery College has a robust transfer program.

Maryland’s most successful dyad is students who transferred from Wor-Wic Community College to Salisbury University; 10% of students who transferred using that pathway graduated with a bachelor’s degree. Nationally, there were only 18 dyads with completion rates of more than 10%. The most successful dyad, Tri-County Technical College X Clemson University, had a completion rate of 20%. Kapiolani Community College X University of Hawaii at Manoa had a completion rate of 16%. Followed by four dyads with a completion rate of 13%, four dyads with a completion rate of 12%, and eight dyads with a completion rate of 11%.

Size of Transfer Programs

In addition to the completion rate of students transferring in a dyad, it is interesting to examine the size of a dyad program because in my mind a truly successful dyad will have both a high completion rate and be the "right" size. What the "right" size is I'm not sure of yet, but of a size that shows that is sufficient to support the continued transfer of students and meets the needs of the students.

The largest number of students transferred from the Community College of Baltimore County to Towson University (2,282). It looks like all transfer students from Montgomery College who transferred to a four-year institution are counted in all four Montgomery College dyads, since the number of transfer students in the denominator is 1,856 for all four dyads. This is not something I fully understood when first looking at the data. If this is true, Montgomery College has a very high total completion rate of nearly 17%.

I experimented to make a chart showing both the number of students who transferred to a four-year institution and the number of students who completed a bachelor's degree. I sorted it by percentage of students who completed a bachelor's degree. I believe the chart works fairly well at illustrating all the data, and it helped me see the potential issue with the Montgomery College data at the same time.

I have been curious about the teacher pipeline in Maryland. So I did what I do when I have a question, I started looking for the available data.

So, I looked at the data published by the Maryland State Department of Education on the prior experience of new hires. According to the data, 58% (2,513) of newly hired Maryland teachers are new to teaching, 19% worked in another state (or the District of Columbia or Porta Rico) just prior, 13% worked in another Maryland county, 9% worked in a Maryland nonpublic school, and the remaining worked in another county or at the SEED School. This data set does not have information about the preparation of new teachers, so I do not know if they received their teaching training at a Maryland institution of higher education or in another state or country. When I have time I will look at other sources of data.

Played around with showing Non-FARMS High School graduates who earn a college degree by age 25. The Maryland Longitudinal Data System Center publishes the data as a percentage of high school graduates that enroll in college. I used their published numbers to see the total high school graduates. I was originally interested in FARMs students, but the data was repressed for most of the schools.

As always this is just me exploring the data that is available. I am trying to make sense of the data and be able to remember the information.

I am exploring using a map to display college enrollment data for Anne Arundel County. Unfortunately, I only have a shapefile that includes Crofton HS, which is a new school, so the boundaries do not reflect the boundaries at the time. The are other specialized high schools in the county that are not reflected in the data. Since I haven’t done mapping in a while I had to remember how to upload the data, but I figured it out pretty quickly.

I am a sucker for outcome data by state. I like to take the data from these reports and graph the Maryland data.

This is primarily a blog about me exploring data visualization. I am having trouble flipping the order of the categories, I would like “completed at starting institution” to be on the bottom. I think that being able to easily control the order of the categories is very important. The order shown hides the percentage of students that have graduated from any institution.

I figured it out, but I had to reenter the data. I would also like to add national data on the same chart, but that does not seem to be an option anymore.

Apparently, I can add national data if I make a stacked bar chart, but not for a stacked column chart.

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