Use R to Calculate and Study basic Admissions Metrics

We were talking about admit rates at work, and as luck would have it, I saw the tweet below coming out of the Eduventures conference basically the same day.

More than 70% of American colleges accept everyone who applies. Only 200 colleges accept less than 50% of applicants #eac14 — Karlyn Borysenko (@KarlynMB) June 5, 2014

Because we can download full survey datasets from IPEDS, it’s fairly simple to hack something together fairly quickly to test this ourselves. I won’t say much other than to say I found more than 200 schools, but the difference is trivial.  

All of my R code can be found here. Poke around the repo if these sort of datasets are interesting to you.  

I also have a few plots that highlights what we can do with the datasets.

Lastly, it’s worth noting that the data folder has a CSV file that you can bring into Tableau (or your visualization software of choice) to explore and slice/dice the data even further.