Complex Network Analysis of North American Institutions of Higher Education on Twitter

North American institutions of higher education (IHEs): universities, 4- and 2-year colleges, and trade schools -- are highly active and well-followed on Twitter. An IHE Twitter account averages 20,000 subscribers. Many of them follow more than one IHE, allowing the construction of an IHE network based on the number of co-followers. In this paper, we explore the structure of a network of 1,435 IHEs on Twitter. We discovered significant correlations between the network attributes: various centralities and clustering coefficients -- and IHEs' attributes, such as enrollment, tuition, and religious/racial/gender affiliations. We uncovered the network's community structure linked to homophily -- such that similar followers follow similar colleges. Additionally, we analyzed followers' self-descriptions and identified 12 overlapping topics that can be traced to their group identities.