Tag: transfer students

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.

The more visualizations I make the clearer it becomes that one of the major challenges of visualizing education data is that it is a very complicated system and it is difficult to simplify. For example, I made a visualization of student transfers from Maryland community colleges to Maryland public four-year institutions. This is only a portion of college transfers. It does not include transfers from public four-year institutions to other four-year institutions. It also does not include other segments of higher education institutions such as private four-year institutions or out-of-state institutions. There is not an easy way to simplify the data.

I made this data visualization using the “chord diagram with animated bullets” demo by amcharts. I just added in my data. The demo has 6 nodes, mine has 29. The good thing is that the nodes can be clicked off so that you can examine only specific nodes. For example, you could click off all but two of the community college to compare them.

Animated BUllet Chord Diagram of Student Transfers: Maryland Community Colleges to Maryland Public Four-year Institutions

Note: I just noticed when testing the post that this chart does not look great on mobile. It works better if you turn your phone to landscape mode. I am going to explore this further.

  • BSU=Bowie State University
  • CSU=Coppin State University
  • UB=University of Baltimore
  • UMBC=University of Maryland Baltimore County
  • UMCP=University of Maryland College Park
  • UMES=University of Maryland Eastern Shore
  • UMGC=University of Maryland Global Campus
  • SMCM=St. Mary’s College of Maryland
  • MSU=St. Mary’s College of Maryland
  • MSU=Morgan State University
  • UMB=University of Maryland, Baltimore
  • BCCC=Baltimore City Community College
  • CCBC=Community College of Baltimore County
  • CSM=College of Southern Maryland
  • MC=Montgomery College
  • PGCC=Prince George’s Community College

Source: Maryland Higher Education Commission: Undergraduate transfers among Maryland institutions of higher education 2019-2020, May 2021.

chord Diagram Student Transfers: Maryland Community Colleges to Maryland Public Four-year Institutions

Note: I just noticed when testing the post that this chart does not look great on mobile. It works better if you turn your phone to landscape mode. I am going to explore this further.

I removed the bullets to reduce the visual clutter. I think I like this version a little more, although I think that I can still make improvements. To improve it I stole the best elements from the “Who kissed who in Friends” chord diagram demo. I still think that I can make further improvements, but I need to explore the coding options a bit deeper to figure out what changes I would like to make. With this version, I may be able to add in the full names of the institutions in a future version.

This drill-down sunburst chart shows the breakdown of students that transferred to the University of Maryland College Park in fiscal 2020. The first layer shows the type of sending institution: Maryland Community Colleges; other University System of Maryland institutions; Maryland private institutions, including institutions that belong to the Maryland Univerity and College Association (MICUA); and out-of-state institutions. The second layer shows the institutions. However, since the original data source only shows the top institutions in a particular category, the names of not all out-of-state institutions are captured.

This chart is based on an Amcharts demo for a drill-down sunburst chart. This particular data only had two levels, but additional levels can be added if you have hierarchical data with multiple levels. As with several other charts I have tried making with Amcharts, this chart did not work in their add-in for WordPress. I however was able to add my data using Notepad. Then I saved the document as an HTML file by changing the file extension to .HTML. Then I uploaded the file to the media library for my website. Finally, I used some HTML code on this page to creat a frame and pull up the chart. I explained that process and shared the code I used in a previous post about my experiences making charts and maps with amcharts.

The chart shows that 63.6% of transfer students came from Maryland community colleges. Half (50.3%) of those students from Maryland community colleges came from Montgomery College, which is located in Montgomery County not far from UMCP. Anne Arundel Community College, Prince George’s Community College, and Howard Community College were also the source of a large number of transfer students. The second-largest source of transfer students is out-of-state institutions. For that category none of the sending schools are dominant. The biggest category is “other”.

UMCP Transfer Students in Fiscal 2020 Drill Down Sunburst Charth

Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS

I modified one of the Amcharts demos called map with curved lines to make a Maryland map with lines. I want to show how students transfer among colleges at universities in the state using a map. I have successfully created the base map, but I have not yet figured out how to add a stroke width to the lines. I think it would be interesting to have the thickness of the line represent the number of students that transferred. I want to see if location is a factor in transferring.

I have read through the Amcharts documentation, but I still can not figure out how to change the stroke width for each individual line. I did figure out how to change the width for all of the lines at the same time, but that is not what I want to do. I noticed when I made the lines thicker the map looked really messy, so this idea might not get off the ground even if I figure out the technical details. The issue is while I am pretty good at figuring out technical issues I do not have a strong foundation in using javascript libraries. I have an 11 hour YouTube video that I am planning on watching to build a stronger foundation, but I have not yet made the time to watch it. I keep on spending my time trying out new ideas on visualizing data. I have so many data visualizations I would like to build, I need more hours in the day to build them all. I hope I will get quicker with time

Maryland Map with Lines

If I decided to go this route I just need to take the time to enter the names and longitudes and latitudes of all of the institutions. For this map I just googled the institution and “longitude and latitude”; however, I just discovered the U.S. Department of Education College ScoreCard data download has longitude and latitude information. In the future I will try using the ScoreCard longitude and latitude information.

These charts shows the student level: freshman, sophomore, junior, senior, or unclassified of students that transfer from Maryland community colleges to University System of Maryland institutions. According to the notes on the data by the University System of Maryland, the transfers are the number of undergraduates enrolled for the first time at the institution with known prior undergraduate post-secondary experience. The students may or may not have transferred credit.

Treemap Maryland Community College Transfer Students by Student Level

Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS, Maryland Community College Transfer Students by Student Level, Fiscal 2020

Drill Down SunBurst Maryland Community College Transfer Students by Student Level

Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS, Maryland Community College Transfer Students by Student Level, Fiscal 2020

I learned how to add specific colors to an Amcharts treemap. Green indicates an increase of transfer students from that institution to the University of Maryland College Park from fiscal 2019 to fiscal 2020. Red indicates a decrease and gray steady. Not groundbreaking, but it did take a while to figure out how to do the coding and then type it all in. Not sure if this is a good or bad way to visualize the data. Like with most of these graphics, first I need to build it and live with it a while before I can judge it.

I am also not sure if it is good or bad for students from particular institutions to increase or decrease. I just used red and green because it is easy to remember.

In the future, I would probably have a range of greens and reds to indicate the scale of the increase or decrease. For today I could not decide if I should code by number or percent, so I did nothing. Also, I am still trying to figure out how to “lighten” a color in Amcharts. I could just type in a different hex color, but that takes the fun out of learning how to do the coding for Amcharts.

To get this to work I needed to add a variable called “color”. I did this by typing “chart.dataFields.color = “color”;” I then wrote “color: “red” (or whatever color) for each institution. According to the documentation by Amcharts you can use many types of systems to set the colors, from just typing the name as I did to the hex color system.

Here are the ways to add color according to Amcharts.

am4core.color(“#ff0000”);
am4core.color(“#f00”);
am4core.color(“rgb(255, 0, 0)”);
am4core.color(“rgba(255, 0, 0, 0.5)”);
am4core.color({ r: 255, g: 0, b: 0 });
am4core.color(“red”);

Color-Coded Treemap Transfer STudents

Color-coded treemap of students that transfer to the University of Maryland College Park in fiscal 2020 compared to fiscal 2019. It seems to me that the coding, by the University System of Maryland in particular for the out-of-state students changed between fiscal 2019 and 2020. Also they only show the details for the top 15 institutions in any category.

Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS Transfer Students FY 2019 and FY 2020

I have made more treemaps. This time showing transfer students to the University of Maryland, College Park in 2020.

In the first treemap, I show the level 1 names, and the level 2 names are hidden. Clicking on the level 1 names will reveal level 2.

Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS

In the second treemap, I show the level 2 names at first open. Clicking on the level 1 names will focus just on that level.

Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS

I am not sure which treemap style I like the best. I think it will depend on what I want the treemap to show. It might depend on the story I want to tell with the data.

I have found it is a little difficult to read the smaller categories of the treemaps, which might make them less useful. I expanded the height from 300 px to 500 px, but I am thinking of expanding them further to 700 px or 800 px. I also find the smaller categories sort of difficult to click on.

Today I am testing out a treemap that I made in Amcharts. I made a treemap of the students that transfer into the University System of Maryland in 2020. The top layer is the education sector, the second layer is the institution. I am still having a bit of trouble getting it to behave as I would like. I would like the second layer names to appear in the boxes, but I can not seem to get it to work as it does in CodePen. Again I got it to work in CodePen using an Amcharts demo as a model, but again I ran into an internal 500 error when I tried to transfer the code over. So I rewrote the code keeping out the pieces that were not rendering properly.

The treemap clearly shows that there are a large number of transfer students from the US Armed Forces, in part because of the University of Maryland Global Campus. I may make another treemap that excludes transfer students from the University of Maryland Global Campus.

Second Layer Hidden

Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS

I figured out how to show the size of the institutions before drill down, but not the institution names. There is likely a simple way to show the labels on a treemap in Amcharts, but I have not yet figured out how. I think that I like the first style better, but I will need to test both versions.

Second Layer Shown

Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS

UPDate

I realized while I was digging into the data further that I missed the 16,362 students that transferred from “other” out-of-state institutions and 5 students that transferred from “other” MICUA/MD private institutions. I missed them because the institution details is only provided for the top 15 institutions in each of the drill-down categories.

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