Almanac 2021-22
The Chronicle’s annual compendium of data
The urge to measure just how higher education is doing is particularly strong as colleges prepare to begin yet another academic year under the specter of a global pandemic.
The Chronicle‘s 2021-22 Almanac provides a snapshot in data of how colleges and universities have fared, along with a glimpse of the issues and trends they might wrangle with in the future. We’ve provided a portrait in numbers of not only institutions but also their employees and students. We’ve also shined a light on college finances — the money they make, manage, and spend.
This year we used data to capture some of the most noteworthy ways colleges have navigated what is likely to be a forever-altered higher-education landscape.
Explore the sections below, and visit The Chronicle Store to get your copy of the print or interactive PDF editions. You can also purchase data sets from which the tables and charts were produced.
2021-22 ALMANAC DATA HIGHLIGHTS
About the photos
By mid-January 2020, when Covid-19 was a blip on the radar for most Americans, it was part of the daily dialog in my family. Our 10-year-old daughter was born in Hubei Province, which includes Wuhan. I felt the world was on the precipice of an event unlike anything any of us had lived through, so I began filing audio stories for our local public-radio station and NPR’s Morning Edition, exploring the anxiety within the local Chinese and the Chinese American community.
Winter turned into a frightening spring and spring into a dolorous summer. In late July, I turned from audio reporting to photography. The Washington Post published a series of my photographs under the headline “Campus Life Under the Shadow of a Pandemic.”
I continued to photograph the academic year from hell. The more I explored, the more I realized that though we were collectively living under the shadow of Covid-19, each of us was also living within our own personal shadow — a flat, dark, ethereal space within which we would never have chosen to subsist but to which we cling because it was the closest approximation of normalcy we could find. It is this tenebrous existence, and the grief for what we had known, or hoped for, and in either case lost, that I work to evoke through my photographs.
Charles (Stretch) Ledford is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a photojournalist and multimedia producer.