Learn how to use the Postsecondary Data Partnership Enrollment dashboard to understand the demographic profile of first-year students.
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Transcript
In this tutorial, we demonstrate how to use the PDP Enrollment dashboard to understand the demographic profile of our first-year students.
The enrollment dashboard reports the 12-month enrollment counts and key characteristics for first-time and transfer-in students enrolling at the institution by cohort year. You can use this dashboard to understand institutional context like student characteristics, level of academic preparation and access.
Let's use this dashboard to answer this research question: what is the demographic profile of our first-year students?
First, navigate to the PDP enrollment dashboard. Our research question asks us to identify the demographic characteristics of our first-year student population. First, let's explore gender. To add a dimension, click on edit, which opens chart settings. Select gender from the dimension dropdown and click apply settings.
Now we can review the results. Scrolling down, we find three lines. One line represents female students, one represents male students and one represents students whose gender is unknown. To remove the students whose gender is unknown, we need to apply a filter. To do that, we need to scroll back up, click on edit, which opens chart settings, click gender and deselect unknown. Then click apply settings.
Hovering over the 2022-23 data points, we find that 54.1% of our first-year students are female while 45.9% are male.
Now let's reset our gender filter by adding back in the unknown category. Next let's apply the race/ethnicity dimension. Hovering over the 2022-23 data points, we find 43.2% of our first year students are Hispanic. Reviewing the trend line for this student group, we see that Hispanic student enrollment has grown dramatically from approximately 4,000 students in 2017-18 to over 10,000 students in 2022-23, which is a 154% increase in enrollment. The next largest student group are white students, which comprise 36.5% of the most recent cohort. This student group had a 26% increase in enrollment from 2017-18 to 2022-23. The next largest student group are Black or African-Americans, which comprise 99.1% of the most recent cohort. Their increase in enrollment from 2017-18 to 2022-23 is an impressive 67%. The fourth largest student group by race/ethnicity are Asian students, which comprise 3.9% of the most recent cohort. Their enrollment increase from 2017-18 to 2022-23 was 29%.
Next, let's apply the age dimension. Hovering over the 2022-23 data points, we find that 43.2% of first-year students are older than 24 years, 39.4% are 20 years old or younger and 17.4% are between the ages of 20 and 24.
Let's summarize what we learned through this exploration. We found that the largest segments of our students are female, Hispanic and older than 24 years.
We encourage you to explore your institution's PDP dashboards to better understand who your students are and to share that information with your stakeholders. Thank you for joining us.