Tools: Arm Yourselves with the Facts About Your School

I was recently forwarded a website that may prove rather useful to student organizers everywhere:

http://www.economicdiversity.org/

The site, "Economic Diversity of Colleges," bills itself as "the first publicly available source of campus-level data on student income, race and ethnicity, and student loan usage that can be compared over time and across institutions."

I dug around the site for awhile, and let me tell you, it's a gold mine. Too often are students at a disadvantage when it comes to knowing the hard facts about their schools, facts that can bolster their arguments, or suggest new areas of opportunity for organizing. Their comparison tool is also incredibly versatile — and useful when looking at how your school stacks up to other, roughly equivalent, schools, in terms of perhaps the average family income, or racial makeup, or tuition increases. Yes, that's right — they also allow you to track the changes of these numbers over several years!

I really hope this site stays around and keeps gathering data. Good (data) hunting!

PS - When you're on a school's profile page, be sure to click on the links at the top next to "PROFILE:" for more statistical goodness!