Doctoral Degrees Awarded, 2012

I continue to find good and interesting data in the new release of the NCES Digest of Education Statistics. Although it's not yet complete, tables are being published as they are ready.

Again, the good folks at NCES provide a great service, but they still think in terms of 1996: That people want reports they can print off and study. That may still be true for many people, but I do hope they provide information in a more viz-friendly format at some point in the not-too-distant future. This visualization is a combination of two of those formatted reports, after considerable scrubbing and cleaning of the data.

It shows doctoral degrees awarded by US Institutions participating in Title IV programs in 2012 by gender, ethnicity, and discipline. The top chart is a bubble chart (notwithstanding the objections of data visualization experts, for good reasons) and the two bottom charts are bar graphs, colored by ethnicity and gender.

You'll notice right away two things, I bet: First that purple (degrees awarded to Caucasians) dominates, and second, we produce a lot of degrees in law and health.

You can filter by ethnicity or gender or specific discipline if you'd like (all three charts will update), but instead try this: Use the "Degree Popularity" slider to eliminate the top two or three disciplines on the bubble charts.

Lots of good stuff here, if you're wiling to spend a little time working on it. And yet, there is much that could be visualized that's not. What would you like to see?

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