Surprised? Data from This Year’s Almanac

One of the problems with data is that it is often dated. That’s certainly what happens in college admissions. For the class applying to college now for fall 2027, most of the information you probably will find is from 2024, and if you are lucky, maybe 2025. But finding up to date data from 2026 is hard. Sure, some schools publish admissions numbers pretty quickly, but in general, that’s not a lot of colleges and universities

So I take with a grain of salt The Chronicle of Higher Education’s annual Almanac. This year, it’s dated August 14th for 2026-2027 but most of the data is from 2024 with a bit from 2025. Still it is telling, and to me, quite surprising in places.

Let’s see. In the not so surprising, higher education federal funding was expected to have a 4 percent decline in 2025 – that’s $1.7 billion. Most of the loss came through the drop in funding from the Department of Energy. In the surprising, considering the political climate these days, most institutions saw an increase in underrepresented minorities, although the big loser in that statistic was in schools (53 of them) whose selectivity is under 15%. And again reflecting the political climate in the US, most schools saw a decrease in international applications.

As of Fall 2024, 57.7% of undergrads were female of the almost 20 million full time and parttime students enrolled.

And then I looked a little deeper into the stats – into freshman retention for fall 2024 – that is, the number of students continuing on in higher education from freshman year to sophomore. Of public institutions, the highest retention numbers came from Georgia Tech – 98%!, followed by Florica, Virginia, Michigan (Ann Arbor), UCLA, UC Berkeley, Texas (Austin), UNC (Chapel Hill), Maryland (College Park) and Wisconsin (Madison).  The private schools all came in at either 99 or 98% returning. University of Chicago led the way only slightly over Notre Dame and MIT, followed by Penn, Brown, Yale, Dartmouth, Cornell, Princeton and Harvard. Now you know why it’s so hard to transfer into an Ivy! Nobody leaves, so there just isn’t room for latecomers.

And who sticks around to graduate? More Asian and White students in both public and private institutions than any other group, although “nonresident aliens” – international students – have even higher percentages. And women seem to hang in more than men.

What were they studying back in 2023-24? Lots and lots of business, management, and marketing; and the health professions. These were followed by – and this was a surprise – the liberal arts and sciences, general studies and humanities, more than computer and information sciences and education, which were virtually neck and neck. So maybe the death knell of the humanities has wrung too soon…

Have you ever wondered what college presidents and faculty earn? As for the highest paid chief executives, that field is led by Penn, whose president earned over $5M according to data from 2023. Then came USC, Baylor College of Medicine, Columbia, Howard, Boston University, Harvard and Tulane.  On the public side, it was Texas A & M at College Station based on 2025 data by a wide margin at $4.71M, followed by U Washington, the Texas Tech U system, U Kentucky and Florida State.

Faculty salaries were reported as well for Fall 2024. First of all, women comprise more than 55% of nontenure-faculty and around 42% of tenured. Yes, they still make less than their male counterparts, much less. For 2024-2025, the highest paid faculty are those who work at institutions that award doctoral degrees. In terms of public institutions, that means a slew of UCs – UCLA, Berkeley, Santa Barbara, San Diego, Irving and Santa Cruz – over $200,000. And then comes Virginia, UC Davis, Maryland (College Park), UC Riverside, Texas (Austin), Texas (Dallas), Michigan (Ann Arbor), Rutgers (Newark), Wisconsin (Madison), and the NJ Institute of Technology.  For private institutions that award doctorates, no surprise that the list is led by Stanford and Princeton, with salaries over $300,000, followed by MIT, Harvard, Yale, Penn, NYU, UChicago, Columbia, Dartmouth, Northwestern, Cal Tech, Duke, Rice and Georgetown. Those profs make more than their counterparts in public institutions.

Some schools only offer master’s degrees, and among the salary leaders in the public sector are U New Hampshire, Morgan State, U Washington (Bothell), U Maine (Orono) and William Patterson U. On the private side, the leader is Babson College, then Bentley and Bryant (the three New England business colleges); U New Haven, Providence College, Merrimack College, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical U and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). I think that RISD may be rewarding its professors for taking a daily trek up that steep Providence Hill!

And finally, the colleges that only award bachelor’s degrees: On the public side: Florida Polytechnic, U California (Merced), Cal State – Channel Islands; US Merchant Marine Academy and sitting in number 6, Penn State U-Harrisburg, my hometown. On the private side: Barnard, Claremont McKenna (CMC), Amherst, Pomona, Swarthmore, Williams, Wesleyan (Conn), Bowdoin, Wellesley, Vassar, Harvey Mudd, Colby and Colgate.

There is a wealth of information in the Almanac, far too much to list here. If you’d like to learn more and do some more intensive drilling down, you can peruse the Almanac yourself for a $49 fee.

In the meantime, I leave you with just a few more nuggets:

* The most selective public institution: UCLA; private – Cal Tech

* The largest endowment is at Harvard, followed by Yale, Stanford, Princeton, MIT and the U Texas system

* Doctoral institutions that have grown the most from 2014-2024: Arizona State U Digital Immersion leads on the public side, and Touro U Worldwide on the private.

* Southern New Hampshire University in 2023-2024 was the top producer of bachelor’s degrees in business, management, marketing; English language and literature; history; liberal arts and sciences, general studies and humanities; natural resources and conservation; and psychology.

It certainly looks like digital learning is here to stay.