Tom Schenk Jr. » community colleges

Measuring Transitions Into the Workforce as a Form of Accountability

Tom — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 20:06:27 +0000

A new publication in November’s IR Applications, which is published by the Association for Institutional Research:

This paper explores the relationship between student major and industry of employment and its application to higher education accountability. Data provided by statewide longitudinal data systems (SLDS) have enabled state educational agencies and colleges to follow students into the workforce. While most studies have focused on wage outcomes, this study shows how to use SLDS data to understand the correlation between major and industry. The transition into the workforce is an important outcome since it is an assessment of a college’s ability to develop specific, targeted sectors of the economy. We use SLDS data from Iowa to follow community college alumni from 2002 through 2008.

Find it here.

Finally, a paper out of this project

Tom — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 22:13:44 +0000

Found here. It is based on the visualizing transitions into the workforce project that I have been working on and you can see to the left.

Visualizing Tuition & Fees

Tom — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 20:27:16 +0000

The Chronicle of Higher Education has put together an interactive chart showing tuition and fees at Iowa community colleges. Play through the timeline and you can see tuition and fees becoming a larger share of revenue for the 15 colleges, while state funding declined. There are a couple of notes along the way to highlight majors shifts.

We’ve tried a few other methods to display this same data at the Iowa Department of Education. Below is a the standard image that shows up in our Tuition and Fees Report and Condition of Iowa’s Community Colleges. We use a similar, static plot, with one major difference is we plot on dollar amounts, not percentage.

I’ve previously highlighted a Tufte scatterplot of the same data. Below we use shading to represent the approximate decade of data. The lighest points represent the 1970s, which grows darker until the black points represent the 2000s and the red point is the most recent data:

I like the interactive nature of the Chronicle data, but I don’t like that you cannot see all of the data without having to scroll. I’m not sure why the Chronicle chose to especially highlight Iowa data–it was accompanied by an article about funding in general which talked with a lot of Iowa leaders–but it is always nice to see someone else using our data.

Radio Iowa on community college enrollment

Tom — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 17:55:21 +0000

By Kay Henderson

Press: Fall enrollment up, decline potentially on horizon

Tom — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 20:56:10 +0000

From Mason City Globe-Gazette:

A record total of 106,597 full- and part-time students enrolled in community-college courses this school year, a 4.8 percent increase that marked the 14th consecutive yearly rise in the overall student population.

Tom Schenk Jr., educational program consultant with the state Department of Education, said this year’s jump followed a 14 percent increase last year that was the second-largest rise since the community college system was started in 1965…

Because community college enrollments tend to be cyclical with economic conditions, Schenk said projections call for the number of enrolled students to drop by as much as 9 percent in the next school year.”That’s our best guesstimate,” he said. “Community colleges have been cautious about this huge enrollment increase knowing that this is not something that necessarily is going to be sustainable.”

The projected enrollment for next year stood at 103,290, which would be a 9.3 percent drop from this year’s expected total but a 3.1 percent decline from the actual student count.

I want to clarify, I didn’t say “guesstimate”.

Career Cluster Transitions, A Simpler View

Tom — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 14:20:01 +0000

An excerpt from the larger poster.

n-Tuple Line Graphs: Wages of Graduates and Leavers

Tom — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 19:40:59 +0000

The (Iowa) Community College Student

Tom — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 23:01:19 +0000

Presented to ALOP 282 at Drake University.

Preview: From Major to Targeted Clusters

Tom — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 05:52:14 +0000

From the upcoming The Annual Condition of Iowa's Community Colleges 2009

The state of Iowa has established three targeted industry clusters: advanced manufacturing; bioscience; and information solutions. How have Iowa’s community colleges been supplying the industry? Above is an ideogram showing the path from program major (left) to targeted cluster (right). Obviously bioscience is being well-stocked, mostly from health science majors. I’m a bit surprised though that information technology majors go on to information solutions at about the same rate as other targeted clusters.

I’ve already previewed a few ideograms which show the transition from college majors to industry of employment. You can find the project page here, a presentation, and the poster.

Preview: Community College Finances – Tufte Scatterplot

Tom — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 01:34:16 +0000

I’ve actually shown this graph before at a State Board of Education meeting last year. I don’t think it was received as well as I had hoped. Many people were worried about the “complexity” of the diagram and I did hear some murmuring when I flipped to the slide. Below is the image of the graph and a fuller explanation is below the fold:

The lightest points represent the late 60s and 70s and progressively become darker until the 2000s (black) and eventually 2008 is shown in red. This chart is an implementation of a Tufte scatter plot in Excel. The negative trend shows the share of community college funding is becoming more reliant on tuition and fees and away from state general aid–the remaining is federal, local, and other funding.

Next year there is going to be a large shift toward federal funding from the ARRA monies that supported all of education in Iowa. You can view the entire presentation here.