Isothermal Community College

Isothermal Community College is located in Spindale, North Carolina. It is a public, 2-year institution.

From Wikipedia: Isothermal Community College (ICC) is a public community college in Spindale, North Carolina. Named after its location in the thermal belt, an area in the foothills of Western North Carolina with significantly milder temperatures than its immediate neighboring areas, it is part of the North Carolina Community College System. Isothermal is also the home to the public broadcast station WNCW. The Foundation of the Performing Arts Center at ICC is a community center that hosts plays, concerts, and other events by featured artists and groups. ICC offers several programs, such as Huskins courses in which high school students from the three local high schools can take and attend college courses, and the Rutherford Early College High (REaCH), an alternative high school that combines a college education with high school courses. The school’s athletic program is known as the Patriots. The president, since February 1, 2021, is Margaret Annunziata. Preceding her was Walter H. Dalton, former lieutenant governor of North Carolina.

Notes

These are items that bear looking into more closely.

There are apparently no tenure stream faculty. This can indicate a risk to academic freedom and thus educational quality, as faculty members may be able to lose their positions because of their speech, publications, or research findings.
This institution’s full-time undergraduate enrollment has tended to decrease over time.

Overview of institution

This, and the rest of the page, use info from the most recent year available, generally 2023.

Institution kind: Associate’s Colleges: High Transfer-Mixed Traditional/Nontraditional
Undergrad program: Associate’s Colleges: High Transfer
Graduate program: Not classified (Exclusively Undergraduate)
Enrollment profile: Exclusively undergraduate two-year (see more details below)
Average net price for undergrads on financial aid: $6,756 . This is 30% the average cost of Harvard.
Actual price for your family: Go here to see what your family may be asked to pay. It can be MUCH lower than the average price but also higher for some.
Size and setting: Two-year, small
In state percentage: 99% of first year students come from North Carolina
In US percentage: 100% of first year students come from the US
Student to tenure-stream faculty ratio: Unknown (undergrads to tenure-stream faculty) [Tenure explained]
Student to faculty ratio: 9.8 (undergrads to all faculty)
Degrees offered: Certificate of less than 1 year, Certificate of at least 12 weeks but less than 1 year, Certificate of at least 1 year but less than 2 years, Associate’s degree
Schedule: Semester
Institution provides on campus housing: No
Freshmen required to live on campus: No
Advanced placement (AP) credits used: Yes
Disabilities: 3 percent or less of undergrads are registered as having disabilities.

Map

Comparisons

The sections below show this institution compared with others. The ones listed are ones it has identified as peers, who consider themselves peers, and/or who the federal government considers peers. If a comparison school has the same value as the focal school, its cell is grayed out. In fields where there is a common view that higher (or lower) values are better, the best values are in blue, the worst values are in red. If there isn’t a sense of a particular value being better, values are shown in varying shades of green. Arrows show where there is a signficant trend over time for a school. You can swipe across the table to see more of it; the focal school column is always visible.

Enrollment

General

Teaching

Tenure track faculty are those who are eligible for tenure. This includes both pre-tenure and tenured faculty. Once faculty get tenure, they are (generally) protected from being fired for intellectual reasons, helping to ensure their freedom in teaching and research. They can still lose their positions for misconduct, financial problems, not fulfilling their duties, or other reasons.

Non-tenure track faculty are not eligible for tenure. Some are hired one semester at a time, some have multi-year contracts. They typically have a higher teaching load than tenure track faculty, leaving less time for research or other creative endeavors. They are also easier to fire than tenured faculty. Sometimes they are external experts (a noted musician, a former senator) who are hired to teach some classes without the expected permanence of a tenure-track position.

Note that this chart uses US federal demographic data: it only has two genders and a specified set of ethnicities and races.

Having a low student to faculty ratio is considered a good thing by many, as it can mean more individual attention.

Geography

This has information on the location of the institution. See the about page for more information on what the metrics are and how they are calculated.

Financial Aid

Graduation

Note these are bachelors graduation rates in six years, not four (this is standard). Sample sizes can be small for some demographic groups with few individuals in a school, leading to large year-to-year fluctuations and often extreme values for those groups (if there are two individuals in the class with a given identity, the possible graduation rates are 0%, 50%, or 100% depending on whether zero, one, or both students graduate within six years).

Library

Libraries are changing rapidly. Note that how institutions count digital collections may vary.

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Diversity

The US Census Bureau has a diversity index that goes from 0 to 1. In their words, “A 0-value indicates that everyone in the population has the same racial and ethnic characteristics. A value close to 1 indicates that everyone in the population has different racial and ethnic characteristics.” This uses their formula, but with the resolution available for the federal IPEDS data (which does not separate for a given demographic group whether members identify as Hispanic or not). This metric is about heterogeneity within the population, not the proportion of the population that comes from historically excluded groups.

Following the practice of the census, the index is multiplied by 100 to give the percentage probability a random pair of individuals will have a different background. Most institutions argue that diversity is a benefit, so by default a higher number is listed as better, but there may be cases where this measure does not reflect the mission of a college (for example, 70% of the students at a tribal college or university may be American Indian: that could be low-scoring by this metric but should not be read as “bad” given the institution’s mission).

These numbers are based on the most recent year available, generally 2023, which predates effects of the US Supreme Court’s striking down of affirmative action. This has often changed, sometimes dramatically, the incoming student demographics at some institutions.

Overall diversity

Freshman profile

Demographic data for first time degree-seeking students. Note that this uses US federal demographic data: it only has two genders and a specified set of ethnicities and races.

Freshman geography

Test scores

SAT scores

ACT scores

Majors

This presents information on the number of majors and the median earnings one and five years after graduation for people who got a degree from this institution in that field. The earnings are for those who are working and not enrolled in further education. The earnings data (from the federal college scorecard) also has information on earnings for those categorized as ‘MALE’ and ‘NOMALE’ – for readability, these are recategorized here as “Men” and “Women”, respectively, which adopts the gender binary used in other federal data. “W/M earnings ratio” is the median earnings of women divided by men, as a percentage.

Isothermal Community College