Peak higher education: seeing what AI makes of recent enrollment data

As I write my new book, Peak Higher Education, I research a good amount of statistics. Enrollment data, publication numbers, number of colleges and universities over time — all of these feed into the hopper for analysis, reflection, and representation. I thought it would be interesting to see what generative AI made of it.

So I came up with a simple experiment and applied it to a range of AI tools. I used the same basic prompt on each one: “Find American higher education enrollment from 2000–2024 and visualize it as a graph.” I didn’t upload or link to data because I wanted to see how generative AI applications are doing with search and retrieval.

TL;DR — response were generally disappointing, but ChatGPT came out on top.

ChatGPT gave me this graph, followed by a text explanation:

Here is a graph showing the American higher education enrollment from 2000 to 2024. The data shows a general increase in enrollment up to 2010, peaking at around 21 million students. After 2010, there is a gradual decline, with a sharper drop in 2020, likely due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Enrollment appears to begin recovering from 2021 onwards. ​

That looks pretty good, both the graphic and the text.