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UW Recognized in Princeton Review’s Best Value College Rankings

The Princeton Review released The Best Value Colleges rankings this month and the University of Washington Seattle continues to be recognized as one of the best colleges in the U.S. The Best Value College rankings considered schools with demonstrated excellence in areas such as academics, financial aid, career prospects, and student experience.

In compiling The Best Value Colleges list, The Princeton Review considered more than 40 data points.  The data points include academic outcomes, cost, financial aid, debt, graduation rates, and career and salary outcomes for alumni.  Out of 650 schools considered, 209 schools made the rankings, which the Princeton Review commended as

“…truly the most exceptional in the nation at delivering great academics, affordable cost, and great career foundations.  We strongly recommend and salute the colleges we present here for all they do to help their students with need afford to attend them while delivering an amazing college experience that’s worth every penny.”1

Among public institutions, the University of Washington Seattle was rated #16 on the list of Top 50 Best Value Colleges, up from #18 in 2021.  The Best Value Colleges list considers seven categories in its ranking: overall value, value for students without financial aid, alumni network activity, internship accessibility, career placement, financial aid, and schools making an impact.  Of the seven categories that went into the Best Value Colleges list, the University of Washington Seattle ranked in the top 20 in four categories.

When it comes to value, the University of Washington Seattle was recognized for providing a great return on investment for students.  This year, the UW Seattle placed #11 on the list of Top 20 Best Schools for Internships, highlighting the multitude of career training opportunities students have access to.  Additionally, the UW Seattle placed #16 on the list of Top 20 Best Career Placement in recognition of its career support services and salary outcomes for alumni.

Finally, the University of Washington Seattle was also recognized for engaging students in important work in the community and beyond.  This year the UW Seattle placed #5 on the list of Top 20 Schools for Making an Impact.

 

1 Best Value Colleges Methodology | College Rankings | The Princeton Review

 

2019 Higher Education Trends

As the higher education landscape continues to change and evolve in the United States, below are some select national and state trends driving higher education policy and innovation in recent years. The Office of Planning & Budgeting (OPB) continues to monitor these, and other, trends. This list was curated using multiple sources, including recent news articles and blogs, recent state-level legislation, and higher education trends analyses from The Brookings Institution and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

1. College Affordability

College affordability continues to dominate the national conversation around higher education. This year, the Washington Legislature took big steps to make college more accessible and affordable for Washington families. Read more about the proposal in OPB’s brief on the legislature’s final compromise 2019-21 state budgets.

Additionally, many of the Democratic candidates for president in 2020 have released higher education policy proposals to address college affordability. These proposals include initiatives to increase funding for Pell Grants, to create “free college” using state-federal partnerships, expand student loan forgiveness, and increase dedicated funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and other Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs).

2. Changing Student Profiles

According to the Lumina Foundation, 38 percent of all undergraduates are older than 25. Traditional college students – 18- to 21-year-olds who attend school full-time – now only make up about a third of the college population.

Students are also increasingly taking on additional responsibilities while in school. According to HBSC, 85 percent of students are working in paid employment while studying. Lumina also reports that students work, on average, 19 hours per week.

3. Integrating Data

A report from the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, Association for Institutional Research, and Educause found that “most institutions are investing in data and analytics projects, but few are measuring the resulting costs.”

The report found that colleges are using data in more ways as they modernize and manage programs to show returns on student and state investments. Studies of students’ academic progress and success are the leading types of data projects. Many institutions are conducting several types of student success studies annually. However, nearly one fourth of institutions are not collecting usable business and systems-level data and few institutions are systematically collecting, integrating, and using their data.

4. Changes in Admissions

Last year, the University of Chicago announced that it would no longer require applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores, the most-selective institution ever to adopt a test-optional policy. Today, more than 1000 U.S. colleges and universities have adopted similar policies.

As colleges and universities continue to use data to better understand how their students perform, they become less reliant on test scores. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, “on many campuses, deep dives into enrollment data have helped admissions offices determine which pieces of information they collect from applicants actually help them predict a variety of student outcomes, such as first-year grades and progress toward a degree.” The University of Chicago “found that ACT and SAT scores didn’t tell it much about who would succeed and who would struggle.”

5. Open-Access Research

Global advocates are calling for publicly funded research to be available through open-access sites, rather than behind paywalls of subscription-based journals. Over the last few years, the movement has gained momentum at increasing cost to publishers. In 2018, Florida State University said it would not subscribe to a publisher’s journals in one bundled deal. This year, the University of California system cancelled its contract with Elsevier, one of the biggest academic publishers in the world. The University of Iowa also announced a new open-source online journal, providing open access to the research and creative scholarship of the university.

This debate has some immediate consequences for academics and researchers, who will lose access to journals unless schools renegotiate with publishers. The University of California attempted to mitigate some of these consequences by publishing alternative methods to access publications.

 6. Transnational Students

According to Studyportals, the number of American students enrolling at foreign colleges is expected to grow from 2.3 million student in 2015 to 6.9 million in 2030. This trend is attributed to multiple causes, including “higher ambitions and investments for world-class universities” and “accelerated growth of global, multi-national networks.”

However, in the United States, the number of new international student enrollments is declining. Inside Higher Ed reports that, “New enrollments fell 6.3 percent at the undergraduate level, 5.5 percent at the graduate level, and 9.7 percent at the non-degree level from 2016-17 to 2017-18.” While overall trends remain at an all-time high, increasing by 1.5 percent in 2018, there is some concern that new U.S. immigration policies might have long-term impacts on international enrollment.

7. Online Enrollment

Online courses continue to become more popular in the United States. In 2016-17, overall postsecondary enrollment dropped by almost half a percent, while the number of students who took at least some of their courses online grew by 5.7 percent. Over the last 15 years, online enrollment has quadrupled.

However, a report from George Mason University claims that the growth in online enrollment has been “disproportionately large in the for-profit sector.” Further, “online coursework has contributed to increasing gaps in educational success across socioeconomic groups while failing to improve affordability.”

8. Online Program Managers

As online enrollments rise, online program managers (OPMs) are working with colleges and universities to provide online options for students. OPM providers contract with institutions of higher education to create, market, and recruit for online degree and non-degree programs. In return, OPMs earn a percentage of the revenue or tuition from the online programs offered at public colleges and universities.

College and universities like Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of North Carolina already provide online programs through OPMs. Purdue University chose to acquire Kaplan University in 2017 to directly expand its online presence.

Conclusion

Higher education continues to adapt to new technologies and a changing global environment. This blog represents just some of the most recent changes, and there are many other challenges and opportunities for American colleges and universities. As institutions seek to balance the status quo with contemporary shifts, their flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances will be a key element in determining their future success.

OPB Brief on Published Price vs. Net Price – 2019 update

The 2019 update of the Published Price vs. Net Price brief is now available on our briefs page, and reflects the newest available data.  The brief includes sector-wide data on trends in published price and net price for public and private four-year colleges and institutions, a description of how declining state investment in higher education has spurred tuition increases, and a table comparing the UW’s net price for resident undergraduates receiving grant or scholarship aid to its U.S. News & World Report top 25 research university peers.

UW Fast Facts 2019 – Now Available!

The 2019 edition of UW Fast Facts is now available. You can find it on the OPB website under the UW Data tab, and in the Quicklinks bar on the right. You can also access it directly at UW Fast Facts.

A special thank you to OPB’s Institutional Analysis team, the Marketing & Communications team, and to our partners around the UW for their work to gather, verify, and crosscheck data; format the document; and pull it all together!

Public Profiles – New Interactive Dashboards Now Available!

In May 2018, in collaboration with UW-IT’s Enterprise Information, Integration and Analytics (EIIA) unit, the Office of Planning and Budgeting (OPB) relaunched Public Profiles, which are now five interactive dashboards including:

All dashboards, except Degrees Production Trends (which is refreshed every August), are refreshed with new data every academic quarter after census day. The data is sourced from the University of Washington’s Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW). The numbers presented in all dashboards have been approved by OPB and reconcile against internal institutional dashboards – UW Profiles (requires access to EDW).

These dashboards act as the University of Washington’s “Institutional Fact Book.”  Anyone with the access to the internet can view these dashboards using their preferred browser. Explore the dashboards: https://www.washington.edu/opb/uw-data/uw-profiles-information/

Check back for additional dashboards and visualizations as they become available. Updates regarding these dashboards are also provided by UW-IT on their News page.

Please contact uwprofiles@uw.edu with any questions or for help using these dashboards.

UW Fast Facts 2018 – Now Available!

The 2018 edition of UW Fast Facts is now available. You can find it on the OPB website under the UW Data tab, and in the Quick Links bar on the right.

A special thank you to OPB’s Institutional Data & Analysis team, the Marketing & Communications team and to our partners around the UW for their work to gather, verify and crosscheck data; format the document; and pull it all together.

New OPB Brief on Activity Based Budgeting (ABB) Trends

OPB has released a new brief that provides an overview of Activity Based Budgeting (ABB) distribution principles and trends at the UW in Seattle. This brief updates last year’s overview, adding the most recent year’s data. It compares the ABB budgets of Seattle academic units to those of Seattle administrative units over the last seven years (FY12-FY18). The brief also describes a change in the distribution methodology of net tuition operating fee revenue that became effective in FY18.

A few noteworthy trends described in the brief include:

  • Every academic unit’s ABB budget has increased since FY12.
  • Academic units continue to experience more budget growth than administrative units, both in terms of real dollars and in terms of proportionate growth.
  • Of the 34 percent total combined ABB budget growth for Seattle academic and administrative units, 73 percent occurred in academic units, while the remaining 27 percent occurred in administrative units.

The brief also touches on ABB’s future at UW. OPB is working with stakeholders to address emergent issues identified since ABB’s implementation, such as potentially duplicative courses and degrees, the distribution of supplement funds (e.g. permanent base budgets), and summer quarter revenue from programs run by the Continuum College.

New Peer Tuition Comparisons Now Available

The Office of Planning & Budgeting has recently published new peer tuition comparisons for the 2016-17 academic year. The new tuition comparisons allow you to see UW tuition rates alongside those of peer institutions.

In the past, OPB has published tuition comparisons for Global Challenge State (GCS) peer institutions. However, more recently OPB has moved away from GCS peer comparisons toward comparisons based on the US News & World Report ranking of Top Public Schools. The 2017 US News ranking is available now (the UW is ranked #16 in the nation). The US News peer comparison group includes all public Research 1 (R1) universities ranked #25 or better; because of ties, and because not all top-25 universities are in the R1 category, there may be more or fewer than 25 institutions in this peer comparison group each year. (In order to make comparisons across time, historical averages are calculated based on the 2017 US News peer list, not the US News list current at the time.)

Comparisons include undergraduate, graduate, MBA, PharmD, law, medicine, and dentistry tuition rates for both resident and nonresident students. Most data are provided through the Association of American Universities Data Exchange (AAUDE). For peer institutions that are not part of AAUDE, we found tuition data on the universities’ websites.

For each tuition category, we provide a list of current tuition rates at each institution, along with a chart comparing UW tuition against the peer group average over the past 5 years. This allows you to look at both the UW’s current rates as well as recent trends, side by side with peers. For example, the UW’s resident undergraduate tuition rate is well below the peer average, partially due to tuition decreases in the last two years. Nonresident undergraduate tuition rates, on the other hand, have tracked closely with the peer average (remaining within 5% of the average over the past five years).

You can see more in the peer tuition comparison file, and find other comparisons on OPB’s Peer Comparisons page. Please contact OPB Institutional Analysis at uwir@uw.edu with any questions.

Introducing Peer Finance Dashboards!

OPB’s Institutional Analysis team and UW-IT’s Enterprise Information, Integration & Analytics unit announce seven new peer finance dashboards, available now in UW Profiles. These new dashboards join four existing peer dashboards. Peer dashboards use data publicly available through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) to allow users to compare the UW to peer institutions around the country on a range of student- and finance-focused measures.

With the new finance dashboards, users can compare revenues, expenses, and endowment values at the UW and peer institutions. They can also explore the relative importance of different revenue sources and expense categories across institutions. The expenses story dashboard provides a step-by-step look at the expenses that directly or indirectly support universities’ research and instruction missions.

More information about each of the new peer finance dashboards is available through the online documentation. Please feel free to send any questions or comments to uwprofiles@uw.edu.