If you were to fire up Zoom and hop into an EdSurge editorial meeting, I could almost guarantee that you’d hear this phrase from me at least once: “The people need more charts!”
As the resident chart-ographer for EdSurge, I sorted through a couple dozen data sources last year and made about 100 maps, bar graphs and scatter plots as part of my perennial goal to give readers a new way of looking at a story. (Note: Not every chart made the cut for publication; such is the creative process.)
EdSurge started the Data Bytes series with a dream that more charts could shed light on interesting issues and nuances in education by adding a visual way to explore facts and figures. Last year, we published 15 Data Bytes articles looking at everything from college earnings to academic achievement for students with disabilities.
Here are the Data Bytes and charts that readers clicked on and shared the most in 2025.
College Majors With Six-Figure Starting Salaries
Between the rising cost of higher education and the growing anxiety about whether high schoolers will find college worthwhile, it’s none too surprising that the most popular Data Byte was our dive into which degrees are earning the highest starting salaries.
The College Scorecard has been a reliable source of interesting and sometimes weird tidbits about which degree programs are paying off for students. Our analysis found naval architecture and maritime colleges consistently at the top of earnings data, a field hardly ever mentioned alongside well-known paths like computer science and medicine. The United States Marine Merchant Academy had the highest overall median starting salary of any higher education institution in the country at nearly $96,800.
While the number of young adults who say college is “very important” reached a new low in 2025, according to Gallup polling data, one expert who spoke to EdSurge said worries over challenges like rising tuition and taking on debt are not necessarily deterring Gen Z from pursuing college. Those concerns are most likely to become roadblocks for low-income and first-generation students, said Bethany Hubert, a financial aid specialist at the scholarship app Going Merry by student loan company Earnest.
“I think it comes down to the fact that in the past students could visualize the return on their investment with their education, with their degree,” she told EdSurge in February, “but now Gen Z is coming to this place where they’re thinking college might be a gamble for their financial future, not an investment.”
Parents’ Role in Reversing ‘Sobering’ Reading Scores
Educators spent a lot of time in 2025 thinking about solutions that could turn around tumbling reading scores, as demonstrated by second- and third-most-popular Data Bytes: the results of the nation’s report card by the National Center for Education Statistics and polling results where a majority of teachers said increasing parental involvement would have the biggest impact on scores.
Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that biennial reading scores among fourth and eighth graders fell for a third consecutive time, which the NCES commissioner called “sobering.”
EdSurge’s data visualizations highlighted the gaps in performance between students based on their demographics. White and Asian students’ reading scores were consistently above average — regardless of grade or year — while Black, Hispanic and Native American students’ scores were below average.
Amid this academic turmoil — alongside other issues that affect students, like tightening budgets and teacher burnout — schools have shown a willingness to try new approaches to improving student achievement, like banning cellphones from schools and mining student data to better tailor instruction.
A Data Byte following up on the reading scores dove into Study.com polling data from 700 elementary and middle school teachers found that the top reason teachers felt students were falling behind was because families weren’t making schoolwork a priority at home — and that finding ways to help parents become more involved had the greatest potential to buoy student performance.
Dana Bryson, then senior vice president of social impact for Study.com, told EdSurge in February that there are outside factors that bar some parents from being involved in their children’s education just as there are gaps in test performance among student groups. A language barrier or lack of access to a computer, for example, could make it harder for some parents to help with school work.
“We know there’s a gap in access, especially for families at home,” she says. “Even in districts like [Los Angeles Unified School District] that have a one-to-one ratio with computer-to-student, that doesn’t mean that the parents have one or have access to it.”
Where Did School Enrollment Rise and Fall the Most?
The fourth-most-read Data Byte examined some of the biggest swings in data: how school enrollment changed in the country’s 100 largest districts.
Some of the numbers were truly eye-popping: with the IDEA Public Schools charter district in Texas seeing a 55 percent increase from 2020 to 2024. That’s growth from approximately 34,300 students to 76,800 in four years. Nevada’s State Charter Schools came in second with nearly 30 percent enrollment growth.
Two other Texas districts saw the sharpest declines over the same period, with Fort Worth and Aldine (near Houston) both losing about 14 percent of their students.
The data kicked off what would become a year of “school choice” coverage at EdSurge, with experts telling us they expect 2026 to be the year that a federal tax-credit program speeds up enrollment declines at traditional public schools and that both public and private schools will ramp up marketing to parents.
Melissa Mackedon, executive director of Nevada’s State Public Charter School Authority, told EdSurge last year that parent demand was driving charter schools’ enrollment growth.
“We now realize that education cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach,” Mackedon said. “Different students thrive in different circumstances. The charter space allows parents more voice and choice in determining what is best for their students and they continue to demand more options.”