Demographic Profile of First-Year Students

Transcript
In this tutorial, we demonstrate how to use the PDP Enrollment dashboard to understand the demographic profile of our first-year students.​

As a quick reminder, 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.​

First-year students are students who enrolled in college for the first time and students who have recently transferred into your institution.​

Let’s use this dashboard to answer this research question: What are the demographic profile of our first-year students?​

Before we continue, please remember that the results and trends shown in this tutorial can not be applied to your institution. This data is only for demonstration purposes. Please review your institution’s data before drawing conclusions.​

On the Home Page for the Postsecondary Data Partnership dashboards, clicking the Enrollment icon takes us to this dashboard. This dashboard defaults to the most recent cohort which is 2018-19.​

Our research question asks us to identify the demographic characteristics of our first-year student population. First, let’s explore Gender. Click the dimension drop down and select “Gender”.  ​

Now, we have three lines to examine – the Green line represents female students, the Blue line represents male students, and the Gray line represents students whose gender is unknown.​

Why do some students not have their gender coded? There are several possible reasons, like missing admissions data or students who choose not to identify or do not identify as male or female. To better understand how your data is coded, you should talk to your PDP administrator.​

To filter out the students whose gender is unknown, click the “Gender” global filter, deselect “Unknown”, and click “Apply”.​

Now, by hovering over the 2018-19 data points, we find that 53.9% of our first-year students are female while 46.1% are male.​

Let’s reset our Gender filter by adding back in the “Unknown” category.​

Now, let’s explore the race and ethnicities of our first-year students. Click the dimension drop down and select “Race/ethnicity”.  ​

Scanning the legend, we see that the gray line represents those students whose race/ethnicity is unknown. Let’s filter that data out of the charts by clicking the Race/Ethnicity global filter, deselecting “Unknown”, and clicking “Apply”.​

Once the “Unknown” category is removed, we have eight different lines – one for each race/ethnicity category.  ​

The green line, which represents Hispanic students, has the highest enrollment. Hovering over the 2018-19 data point, we find that 53.5% of our first-year students are Hispanic.​

The teal line, which represents our Black or African American first-year students, has the next highest proportion at 17.2% of first-year students.​

The brown line, which represents white students, is the next highest proportion at 13.9% of first-year students.​

And the orange line, which represents Asian students, has the fourth highest proportion at 8.4%.​

The remaining categories, American Indian or Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, Nonresident Alien, and Multi-racial students make up the remaining 7% of our first-year students.​

We encourage you to explore your institution’s PDP dashboards to better understand your first-year students.​