New Data on Economic Diversity.org

New data for the 2005-06 academic year is live at EconomicDiversity.org today. EconomicDiversity.org is the only publicly available web site with campus-level, multi-year data on student income, financial aid, race and ethnicity, student loan debt, and other variables. Users can easily view data on specific colleges and universities, or compare multiple institutions. The site can be used to identify trends in student enrollment, diversity and financial aid usage, and compare colleges by state, sector, and other criteria.

For example, the updated data shows that the percentage of students applying for federal financial aid increased much faster at community colleges than at four-year institutions over the past five years. The increase was 37 percent at community colleges, compared with ten percent at four-year public institutions, and seven percent at four-year private nonprofit institutions.

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Featured Work

Poll: Young Adults Say Higher Education is More Important but Less Affordable

A national bi-partisan survey of adults ages 18-34 reveals that young adults today believe a college education is more important than it was for their parents' generation, that it has become less affordable in the last five years, and that students are leaving school with too much debt.

Student Debt and the Class of 2010

College seniors who graduated in 2010 carried an average of $25,250 in student loan debt and also faced the highest unemployment levels for new college graduates in recent history at 9.1 percent.

Critical Choices

Our new report looks at promising and problematic practices of financial aid offices when students apply for private student loans.

Still Denied

Our new issue brief Still Denied: How Community Colleges Shortchange Students by Not Offering Federal Loans found that more than one million community college students were denied access federal student loans, the safest and most affordable way to borrow for college.

Adding It All Up

By the end of October, U.S. colleges must meet a federal requirement to create online "net price calculators." We took an early look at how colleges are approaching this requirement and found mixed results for how easy the calculators were to find, use, and understand. 

Student Debt and the Class of 2009

Our student debt report for the class of 2009 found college seniors carried an average of $24,000 in student loan debt while unemployment climbed from 5.8% to 8.7% in 2009.

After the FAFSA

This report sheds light on what happens to federal financial aid applicants after they submit the FAFSA. Using 2007-08 financial aid data from 13 California community colleges, the Institute found that one in three likely Pell-eligible applicants did not receive a Pell Grant.