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Friday, July 9, 2010

Database on Higher Ed Including UCLA


The database described below should get an award for being user-unfriendly. However, it does include UCLA and I did succeed (somewhat) in obtaining some data from it. I invite anyone with more patience to see what might be uncovered. Follow the directions as best you can. The database is at:

http://www.tcs-online.org/Reports/Report.aspx

An excerpt from a description from Inside Higher Ed:

Follow the Money
July 9, 2010

In a sea of often bewildering data about college spending practices, a small island of clarity is emerging.
In conjunction with its third annual “Trends in College Spending” report, released today, the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability provides a publicly available database that allows journalists, policy makers and anyone curious about higher education an opportunity to decipher where college funding comes from and where it goes.
While the Delta Cost Project has for years provided broad overviews of spending practices at various types of institutions, the new database’s groundbreaking feature is that -- fasten your seatbelts -- it allows for an analysis of the budget priorities of individual institutions. Jane Wellman, the project's executive director, hopes that the new data will stimulate conversations about spending priorities and cost containment -- or the lack thereof -- that generally aren’t happening now at the national, state or institutional level. Such conversations, she adds, are long overdue.
“I think we’ve got a lot of habits to break in higher education,” she says.
While there’s much to pore over in the Delta Project’s new report, it is necessarily limited because the federal data on spending the project draws on are now available only through 2008. Consequently, the recession that is now crippling many colleges and universities is barely captured in the current report -- and some of the big spending it meticulously documents happened in what history will likely regard as the heady days of higher ed.

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