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!
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.
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.
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.
Reuters recently ranked the UW as the fourth most innovative university in the world among public and private institutions, surpassed only by Stanford, MIT and Harvard. When looking at public institutions alone, however, the UW topped the list.
As the Seattle Times noted, “The ranking takes into account academic papers, which indicate basic research performed at a university, and patent filings and successes, which point to an institution’s interest in protecting and commercializing its discoveries.”
In addition to the innovation ranking, Washington Monthly recently ranked UW Seattle as the #1 “Best Bang for the Buck” among Western institutions. Institutions are scored on “’Net’ (not sticker) price, how well they do graduating the students they admit, and whether those students go on to earn at least enough to pay off their loans.” For more information about the “Best Bang for the Buck” rankings, please see the companion article.
UW Profiles – a set of dynamic, web-based data dashboards – recently received The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) Best Practices Award. This award is widely considered to be the business intelligence industry’s most prestigious honor.
OPB’s Institutional Data & Analysis team developed UW Profiles, in collaboration with UW IT’s Enterprise Information, Integration & Analytics team, and formally launched the site in fall 2013. UW Profiles allows users to explore core UW data through 21 visual dashboards that display summary, comparison and trend data.
Campus Technology Innovators also honored UW Profiles, calling it “an intuitive, user-friendly portal that provides a single point of access to data and visualizations for faculty and staff.”
Congratulations to Institutional Analysis and to all those who worked hard to make UW Profiles a reality!
The University of Washington was ranked the 14th best university in the world by U.S. News & World Report’s inaugural “Best Global Universities Ranking,” which was released on Tuesday.
Unlike U.S. News’s national rankings, which focus on undergraduate admissions data and graduation rates, these new rankings were based on research-heavy factors such global research reputation, number of publications, PhDs awarded, and highly cited papers (learn more about how the rankings were calculated). This methodological difference helps explains the odd fact that U.S. News ranks the UW 14th globally, but 48th nationally.
“This is about faculty productivity and prestige … It is meaningful for certain things and not necessarily meaningful for other things. We get that. This is about big muscular research universities doing what research universities claim is their mission,” U.S. News Editor, Brian Kelly, told The Washington Post.
The 2015 Best Global Universities rankings include 500 institutions and 49 countries, and provide breakdowns by region, country, and 21 subject areas. The U.S. dominated the rankings with 16 institutions in the top 20, and 134 institutions on the list overall. Germany had the second most institutions on the list, with 42, followed by the United Kingdom, with 38. China, which has received a lot of attention in the higher education world lately, also did well with 27 schools among the top 500.
The UW ranks highly on several other global lists: 15th worldwide by the Academic Ranking of World Universities and 26th by the Times Higher Education World University Rankings.
On Monday, The Equity Line posted the following piece about how the U.S. compares to the other World Cup countries in terms of degree attainment.
More Than Just a Game: Degree Attainment Around the World (Cup)
Posted on June 16, 2014 by Kaylé Barnes and Joseph Yeado
“Defying commentators, critics, and prognosticators, the U.S. has already performed quite well against the other nations competing for the 2014 World Cup. Yes, the competition on the field only started last Thursday and the Yanks have yet to kick things off today, but the U.S. is beating most of the competition in another competition: college attainment.
Among the 32 teams competing in Brazil, the United States ranks third for the percentage of adults with a 2-year or 4-year college degree.
It may look like America has trounced the competition, but there are two important facts that put these figures into perspective.
In 1990 the United States soccer team qualified for its first World Cup after a 40-year drought. Though it failed to win a game and was sent home, the U.S. was ranked first in the world in four-year degree attainment among young adults. Since that time, our men’s national soccer team has steadily improved, but our college attainment rates have not. The United States now ranks 11th among developed nations for young adults with college degrees.
The U.S. may compare favorably to other World Cup countries, but the data still mean that only 2 in 5 adults have some kind of a college degree. In fact, just 59 percent of students at a 4-year college will earn a bachelor’s degree in six years – not to mention that black and Latino students complete at even lower rates (40 percent and 52 percent, respectively). Ranking well relative to other countries doesn’t mean much when we are leaving so many of our students behind.
Third place is not good enough. More important to our country’s well-being than winning the World Cup is whether we have an educated population prepared to face the challenges of the new global economy. Higher education leaders and policymakers should look to the example of the colleges and universities across the country that are leading the way to improve student success and proving that low graduation rates are not inevitable.
The expectations of American soccer supporters have risen steadily since 1990, and millions are tuning in to watch our boys play in Brazil. It’s time that we raise our expectations about college attainment and the equity in attainment levels.
Only then can the United States realize its gooooooaaaaals of being first in the world on the fútbol pitch and in degrees.”
Yesterday, March 4th, President Obama submitted his fiscal year 2015 budget request to Congress. The Institute for College Access & Success (TICAS) has published their analysis of the budget as has the Education Policy Program at New America.
TICAS states that the President’s proposal “takes important steps towards making college affordable for Americans by reducing the need to borrow and making federal student loan payments more manageable.” Specifically, his budget:
The UW’s Federal Relations blog notes that the budget also proposes $56 billion for an “Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative,” which “aims to effectively replace the remaining FY2015 sequestration cuts for nondefense discretionary programs – the programs we care about the most.” Please stay tuned to their blog for more information and updates.
Now that news sources are back from their holiday hiatus, we have a couple of noteworthy stories to bring you. Both articles highlight the continuing trend toward greater accountability.
Florida’s new rules linking tenure with student success are upheld: Last week in Florida, a judge upheld new rules by the State Department of Education that require tenure decisions—known in Florida as “continuing contracts”—to be contingent upon professors’ performance on certain student success criteria. The judge also upheld a new requirement that faculty must work for five years, rather than three, before being eligible for the contracts. The United Faculty of Florida had contested that the new rules were beyond the scope of the department’s powers, but the judge rejected that claim.
Senators propose penalties for colleges with high student-loan default rates: On Thursday, three Democratic senators introduced a bill dubbed “the Protect Student Borrowers Act of 2013,” which would impose a fine on colleges with high student-loan default rates and federal student-aid enrollment rates of at least 25 percent. Penalties would be on a sliding scale. On the low end, colleges with default rates of 15 to 20 percent would incur a fee equal to 5 percent of the total value of loans issued to their students in default. On the high end, schools with default rates of 30 percent or more would incur a 20 percent penalty. The Education Department currently cuts off federal funds for institutions with high default rates, but the senators argue it punishes only “the most extravagant, outrageous schools.” The Chronicle writes, “The proposed legislation would hit for-profit institutions the hardest, as their graduates have the highest default rates, on average.”