User Guide

1. See the anchor impacts for your region.

Type your region into the “search region” bar and click “view result.” Your region’s profile page appears with direct, indirect, and induced impacts for combined anchor institution employment, income, and gross domestic product (GDP). Your region’s place on the reliance index in 2024 is presented below. This page can be downloaded and printed.

2. Understand the individual economic contribution of the hospital and higher education industry sectors in your region.

Click on “Hospital” or “Higher Education” at the top of a profile to see the individual economic contribution of either sector. Direct, indirect, and induced impacts for hospital or higher education employment, income, and GDP will appear on the profile based on your selection. Displaying the anchor data by sector allows you to see what proportion of your region’s total anchor contributions are made up of hospital or higher education impacts.

3. Compare your region with a comparable or competitive set of regions.

Type your region into the search region bar and click “view result.” At the bottom of your regional profile, choose “compare with other regions.” Select the 2024 total combined, hospital, or higher education data set. In the region filter, continue to type the name of comparable or competitive regions (up to 10 total) and click “compare selected regions.” All the regions (up to 10) that you added will appear, and you will be able to download their profile pages or a spreadsheet with the data from the profile pages displayed for all 10 regions. Alternatively, instead of using the “region filter” to add specific locations to compare, use the other filter options to compare your region with others in the same population category or other regions in the same state.

4. View all regions within your state.

Choose a region in your state. Click “view result.” At the bottom of the region’s profile, select “compare with other regions.” In the filter options that appear, within the “state” filter scroll to the name of your state or begin to type it and select it when it appears. All regions within the state will appear — both metro and nonmetro. You can choose up to 10 regions at a time to download.

5. Learn about regions with the highest reliance indexes.

On the page showing the comparison table, make sure the “search region” toolbar is empty. Under the “select metric” toolbar, choose reliance index. Click “view result.” All regions and their reliance indexes will appear, beginning with the largest and going to the smallest. Scroll through the list and check those you’re most interested in viewing details for. Up to 10 regions will appear at a time and you can forward to see additional regions in the ranking. All the regions you select — up to 10 — will appear in the list when you click “compare selected regions.” You can download detailed data about these 10 regions by their reliance indexes. You can repeat this for other metrics, such as total combined employment impacts, hospital income, and higher education GDP.

6. Download the full data set.

You can access the full 2024 data set by scrolling (or jumping) to "data downloads" on any page of the dashboard and clicking on the XLSX icon underneath this section. The full data set includes all data available within a profile for every region, along with a key of the data set's column headings.

Data from previous iterations of the dashboard are also available in the data downloads section. The 2019 data do not contain separate eds and meds impacts. Please note that the anchor impacts in many regions in the 2024 data are not comparable with the 2004 and 2019 data owing to changes in geographic boundaries between the years. For more information on these changes, see the FAQs and Methodology.