Thread by @JonBoeckenstedt

Thread: My love of the Freshman Migration data, coupled with heavy smoke outside, coupled with the question "How can you go back to requiring the SAT when it's mostly going away in California" kept me busy this weekend.

After about three hours of trying to figure out a way to get around the Tableau restriction against using a table calculations in an LOD, I just created a table and exported to Excel and re-imported it as it was. It worked.

Here is a map of the 546 colleges outside of California that show Cali as one of their top five feeder states. That's about 30K students. The size of the indicator shows the number of freshmen from California; the digit shows the rank. A 2 means it's the second biggest feeder

Let's break that down. Not surprisingly, many institutions on the west coast rely heavily on California for freshmen. A few private institutions (blue bars) actually rely on California as the #1 feeder. These charts show rank on the left, and freshmen on the right.

Same, of course with the Southwest, especially the Arizona universities.

Rocky Mountain States? Same thing.

Less a deal in The Great Plains, but who had the University of North Dakota in the betting pool?

Great Lakes states? Pretty impressive. Remember, Purdue and Michigan were two universities that went test-optional late, and, if you read their announcements, went reluctantly. Same with Wisconsin.

South Central? Not so much.

Same for the Southeast. Duke and Emory will have some thinking to do, however.

Middle Atlantic states. NYU, of course, is sort of kind of test-confused, but there are some big hitters here who draw heavily in CA. Sure, some of these places will be full regardless. But will requiring the SATs from CA students depress apps and increase admit rates?

And finally, storied old New England, where demographics force institutions to look outside their region. This is quite the list.

If the publics in CA don't require the SAT--if they actually don't take it--will most of these students be able to take the exam easily? School day, of course, for the well resourced publics and privates. But what about everyone else? Or have I answered my own question?

Think about it a little bit, and do your own research. Many of the big institutions on the west coast or in the Southwest are already test-optional. So your pool of tested students from those states is likely to shrink.

Like I said, think about it.

How confident are you of your brand position and market power? How confident are you that students will endeavor to take the test just for the privilege of applying to your school? In the words of Dirty Harry:

Before you answer, remember that one of those New England institutions saw apps drop by 26% because--get ready--they added one additional essay question. No thread is complete without an @erichoov article.

chronicle.com/article/boston…

Good luck. If you're feeling lucky, that is.

Oh, and #EMTalk