2015-2016 Demographic Changes: When comparing the admissions breakdown from 2016 to 2017, the main difference lies in the percentage of students from Minnesota decreasing from 19.8% to 15.8%. We would think that we would see this difference expressed in the other primarily represented locations, but actually, the change is seen in numerous small changes amongst the lower represented areas such as New York, Connecticut, Maryland, and Texas.
2016-2017 Demographic Changes: When comparing the admissions breakdown from 2016 to 2017, The 2017 admissions class is very similar to that of the 2015 one seeing a resurgence in the number of students from Minnesota and an increase in students from our primary areas of Illinois and California. With this, we also see a decrease in some of our underrepresented regions as well including Washington, Florida, and Pennsylvania.
2017-2018 Demographic Changes: When looking at the admissions demographic changes between 2017 and 2018. We see another decline in the higher-represented areas like Minnesota and Illinois, but see a pretty significant increase in the number of students from New York and an increase in the variation of percentages in the underrepresented states. Specifically, the number of states with multiple students increases and so the smaller percentages are spread thinner.
2018-2019 Demographic Changes: Moving from the year 2018 to 2019 it seems as though the opposite effect from the previous year happens where in this year the change comes from the decrease in percentage of the larger percentage groups such as California having its largest decrease yet. 2019 like 2018 however does seem to have more smaller percentage groups showing us an increase in the diversity of the origin of admitted students.
2019-2020 Demographic Changes: Moving from 2019 to 2020 there seems to be a shift back to an increase in students from Minnesota, but the most interesting change in demographics is the appearance of Wisconsin from not being displayed on the chart to taking on a whopping 4.6% of admitted students. We would later see that this demographic would only ever happen again in 2023, but even then not to the same scale. A hypothesis that we have about why this happened relates to the other section of our data analysis, that is the impact COVID-19 had on admissions. Being there was a lot of anxiety at the time given moving out of state due to quarantine we think more students applied and were therefore admitted from Wisconsin as it is close to Minnesota.
2020-2021 Demographic Changes: Given the changes we saw in the previous year, it is interesting to see that states such as Wisconsin fall off of the map, but not so interesting to see that Minnesota, California, and Illinois go back to being the dominant place of origin for admitted students. This section of the yearly breakdown seems to revert to the older demographics such as in 2016 where the representation in the top three states is high and the representation for the rest is all spread thin.
2021-2022 Demographic Changes: Within this year we see a similar pattern become even more obvious where it seems as though the larger chunks of the pie graphs get bigger and the smaller groups get even smaller. The main outlier in this plot and year is the increase in students from Texas. A possible reason for this includes the Posse scholarship that Carleton is connected with provides scholarships for students from Texas, so there is already a flat number of students from Texas each year guaranteed and so an increase in students from that area outside of the Posse scholarship would reflect a larger percentage of students from Texas relative to other states.
2022-2023 Demographic Changes: Once again we see the same pattern of students from the upper epsilon of states continuing to grow specifically seeing Minnesota hit a new height of 23.6% the other changes in the pie chart seem very small but the pieces of the lower represented areas seem to become slightly thinner which means that there does seem to be a slight pattern since the start of COVID.
2023-2024 Demographic Changes: Going into the most recent admissions we see that there is a little bit of a drawback in the recent post-COVID pattern we were noticing. We do see the upper portion of our demographics start to come down some while other states rise a little. We think this could be because we are starting to move past the COVID period and are beginning to go back to the type of change periods seen in previous years.