First-Year Enrollment Dashboard

The First-Year Enrollment dashboard shows 12-month enrollment counts and key characteristics by cohort year for students enrolling at your institution for the first time. You can use this information to track college access trends by student characteristics across six cohort years, which can give you an idea of your institution’s success at enrolling specific groups.

Which Students are Included

The dashboard calculations include only undergraduate students who enrolled for the first time at your institution either by transferring in or as their first time enrolling in college. The dashboard considers all students submitted in your cohort data file who meet these requirements to have been enrolled in that cohort year.

Dashboard Sections

Most Recent Cohort Callout Boxes

These callout boxes display the counts of students (total, first-time, and transfer) for the most recent cohort displayed by PDP. If these boxes are blank, you likely have not submitted your most recent cohorts to PDP.

The up/down indicators show the percentage change from the previous cohort (i.e. the 2023-2024 cohort compared to the 2022-2023 cohort).

Enrollment Trends by Dimension

This section displays your institution’s enrollment across cohorts with a disaggregation by dimension. The data is displayed in stacked bars that show trends in first-year enrollment from one cohort to the next. You can hover over any point in a line to view the student count and percentage.

This visualization will default to a dimension breakdown of Enrollment Type but can be changed by the green dropdown menu above the visualization.

Demographic Breakdowns for Given Cohort

This section displays demographic breakdowns for a given cohort year.  By default, the custom breakdown will show Enrollment Type, but can be changed by the green dropdown menu above the visualization.  The other three will always remain as Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Age at Entry.

For each visualization, you will see the selected cohort, as well as “All My Available Cohorts” that includes students from all cohorts you have submitted to PDP (up to the last 8 years).

Using the Dashboard

The best way to use this dashboard is by selecting dimensions. Dimensions allow you to view changes in student populations in each cohort across several years. For example, you can see student readiness in math or English by selecting the math prep dimension and then adding the English filter. The dashboard will display the count and percentage of students not ready for either math or English.

If you select a dimension with multiple values, like race/ethnicity, you can use the race/ethnicity filter to remove populations and refine the data.