Using HCE to Analyze Patterns Among Universities

I was interested in looking at patterns among a small set of universities to see if any interesting patterns existed. The reason the dataset ended up being small (21 Universities) was because the data had to be collected by hand. Some universities keep their records in what is known as the Common Data Set Format. A handful of these universities publish these yearly reports on their website, ranging in formats from PDF to HTML to XLS. It was pretty easy to find the forms by using google because the format remains the same within each document. The form consists of 10 sections (General Information, Enrollment, First-year Admissions, Transfer Admissions, Academic Offerings, Student Life, Annual Expense, Financial Aid, Faculty and Class Size, and Degrees Conferred). I only extracted sections from General Information, Enrollment, First Year Admissions and Annual Expense (Tuition).