Distance Education continues its upward climb according to the most recent distance education data from IPEDS. The number of programs increased 8.2% in 2016, but this increase was less than the whopping 12.6% in 2015. There are now over 29,000 programs offered through distance education. Certificate programs continued their strong…
The CDC recently released updated Natality (Births) data for 2016. State laws require birth certificates to be completed for all births, and Federal law mandates national collection and publication of births and other vital statistics data. The National Vital Statistics System provides access to statistical information from birth certificates and CDC makes…
Reports by College Board and others have indicated that net price, the true measure of what a student pays to attend college, continues to rise. College Board has maintained that the actual net price has been increasing for six to eight straight years. Net price is defined as the…
The new IPEDS Outcome Measures (OM) survey is the first stab at going outside of the traditional first-time, full-time reporting. We took a birds-eye view of this data across the landscape of reporting institutions using a new Graduation Rates Interactive. A total of 3,838 institutions reported data under the OM…
The IPEDS Enrollment by Major Fields of Study is collected every other year and 2016 is a new reported year. IPEDS collects nine major fields of study and the enrollment is disaggregated by attendance status (full-time, part-time), level (undergraduate, graduate), race, and gender. There are numerous ways to breakdown…
Last week we introduced the new CMS opioid data set and what it means. This data tries to initiate transparency around this hot topical area even though Part D Medicare claims may not be the best proxy of all opioid prescription activity. There are three elements to this data: Part…
Given the state of the opioid crisis, any meaningful data is valuable. So when CMS released three years of Opioid Part D prescription data in November, we all rejoiced. CMS also released a mapping tool to analyze the data. While mapping tools can be effective, they can also get in…
There is a general perception that a rising economy raises all economic boats. But poverty rates would indicate that the poorest of the poor just seem to get poorer. Many counties have actually experienced a rise in poverty rates from 2012 to 2016. We took a quick look at the…
We all know that health insurance is a moving target. According to the most recent ACS survey data, the national uninsurance rate declined from 13.0% to 11.7% in 2016. Public insurance coverages increased slightly more than private coverages (increases of .9% and .6%) respectively. This change was short-lived as Gallup…
The new CDC mortality data continues to paint a rather grim picture. Last week we focused on the external causes of the rise in death rates. This week we analyzed the mortality (death) rate among age groups using over 1.8 billion data points over 17 years from the CDC. You…
The mortality (or death) rate increased nominally from 2016 to 2017 going from 844 to 849 deaths per 100,000. This probably is not earthshaking news but based on the overall crude rate, it has actually been increasing since 2009 as noted by the following graph. Advances in medical care…
Welcome to 2018! We are making some fundamental shifts to our Weekly Insights which I hope you will enjoy. We are moving our content towards more video and free self-service analysis around our weekly topical theme. We welcome your feedback and your ideas. Over 70% of population health is…