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Showing posts from December, 2013

My Tableau 3 Minute Win

You know I love to use Tableau Software , and I wish more people in higher education did, too.  So I took the Tableau challenge to see what I could do in three minutes. Take a look at this table of data I used for bachelor's degrees, and the companion one for master's degrees and see what patterns jump out at you.  Go ahead.  I'll wait. I spent about 20 minutes cleaning up the data, but only three minutes visualizing it once I pulled it into Tableau (and that took another 20 seconds or so.) Here is the video, in real time, of how I built this dashboard: And here is the finished product.  I ran out of time, or I'd have spent 10 more seconds to change the colors on the bar charts, since orange/blue was already in use to show concentration on the map. Higher Ed People: No more excuses.  Make your data meaningful and interesting with just a little work. Learn About Tableau

How Much Do We Pay Public School Teachers?

Blogger's note: With 10,000 views (about 50 times average) I've received a lot of comments.  You may want to read this first before responding) While public school teacher salaries are not exactly a Higher Education topic, it's not too hard to see the connection. This is NCES Data from the 2013 Digest of Education Statistics, showing teacher salaries over time by state. The view defaults to Constant (inflation adjusted) dollars and 2013, but you can choose any year and nominal (not adjusted for inflation) dollars if you'd like.  The map color codes for the year selected so you can see the range, and the bar chart shows the state-by-state breakout; the weighted US average on is shown on the bar chart in blue. See the NCES table for notes about interpreting the data. Note: My Tableau coding skills are still not what I'd like them to be; if anyone wants to download this and help me create parameters to allow the viewer to compare states by percent change ove

Where everyone gets a scholarship

I started with an interesting question: How many private colleges and universities in the country give everyone--100% of freshman--some type of institutional aid? It was easy to get the answer: 183 of the 1,066 who have enough data in IPEDS to calculate such things. That's 17%. For some, it's understandable: Berea College, Cooper Union, the College of the Ozarks, or Olin, for instance.  They all have special populations and special funding models.  But what about the others? I arrayed the world of private, not-for-profits on a scatter chart, on top. The x-axis is calculated mean ACT scores (the average of the 25th and 75th percentile as reported in IPEDS).  The y-axis is the draw rate, which is yield rate divided by admit rate.  It's a power measure of market position, notwithstanding some very small non-selective institutions report bad data to IPEDS that makes their draw look high.  (The average draw is about .7, for instance; but Harvard's is 14, and Stanford'

Degrees Awarded by State, 2012

From the still-rolling-out NCES 2013 Digest of Education Statistics comes this: Degrees awarded by type of degree and state in 2011-2012. Choose the type(s) of institution(s) you'd like to include, and then the degree level: Associate's, Bachelor's, Master's or Doctoral.  The blue bar shows the number by state, and the colored bars in the right hand column show the percent of that state's population awarded that degree in 2012.  The maps at the bottom are colored by the raw numbers; hover over any data point on the map or bar charts to see the details. I've started this showing Associate's degrees, and including only public and private, not-for-profit institutions. If you'd like to add private, for-profit institutions, you can easily do that, but the numbers and especially percentages get skewed to Arizona and Iowa, due to large for-profit corporations that are housed there. The degrees they award roll up to the home state, even though the majority o

Degree Programs Over Time

Amid talk about new or exciting or trending degree programs, there is this: A visualization of all bachelor's degrees awarded from 1971 to 2012. This shows the data three different ways, but all are colored identically by major or program.  The top left shows the total number of degrees awarded in each year shown; the top right shows everything scaled to 100%, and the bottom chart is a "bump chart" that shows popularity over time. In order to make sense of this, you're going to have to interact. Use the color legend at right, and click on a program of interest.  Then, in the upper right of the color legend, click the little pencil.  You'll see that program highlighted in all three displays.  Click the programs to your heart's content. You can also hover over the highlighted selection on any of the charts to see the data for that year in a text box.  To return to the full display, click the pencil again. I'm astounded at the relative stability o

State Appropriations for Higher Education

It's a common refrain: State funding for higher education is being cut.  Is it? And if so, by how much? Below are three views of the data: On the first dashboard, you see two line charts: The top shows changes in state and local appropriations for higher education over time; on the bottom you see percentage change from 2000--2010.  Not that these are nominal (non-inflation adjusted) dollars.  If you want to compare to inflation, you should know that CPI rose about 27% between 2000 and 2010. These are also not adjusted for enrollment; it's possible, of course, to show a large increase that does not cover increasing enrollments, and this is likely especially true for states with population growth in the south and southwest. And this data is subject to the anchoring fallacy: There is nothing magic about choosing the year 2000 to start. There is no way to tell if the amount in 2000 was too high, too low, or just right.  It's just based on available data; if we started in