Skip to main content

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?



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Educational Attainment and the Presidential Elections

I've been fascinated for a while by the connection between political leanings and education: The correlation is so strong that I once suggested that perhaps Republicans were so anti-education because, in general, places with a higher percentage of bachelor's degree recipients were more likely to vote for Democrats. The 2024 presidential election puzzled a lot of us in higher education, and perhaps these charts will show you why: We work and probably hang around mostly people with college degrees (or higher).  Our perception is limited. With the 2024 election data just out , I thought I'd take a look at the last three elections and see if the pattern I noticed in 2016 and 2020 held.  Spoiler: It did, mostly. Before you dive into this, a couple of tips: Alaska's data is always reported in a funky way, so just ignore it here.  It's a small state (in population, that is) and it's very red.  It doesn't change the overall trends even if I could figure out how to c...
Post a Comment
Read more

First-year student (freshman) migration, 2022

A new approach to freshman migration, which is always a popular post on Higher Ed Data Stories. If you're a regular reader, you can go right to the visualization and start interacting with it.  And I can't stress enough: You need to use the controls and click away to get the most from these visualizations. If you're new, this post focuses on one of the most interesting data elements in IPEDS: The geographic origins of first-year (freshman) students over time.  My data set includes institutions in the 50 states and DC.  It includes four-year public and four-year, private not-for-profits that participate in Title IV programs; and it includes traditional institutions using the Carnegie classification (Doctoral, Masters, Baccalaureate, and Special Focus Schools in business, engineering, and art/design. Data from other institutions is noisy and often unreliable, or (in the case of colleges in Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and other territories, often shows close to 100% of enro...
Post a Comment
Read more

Education Levels in the US, by State and Attainment

Attainment has always been an interesting topic for me, every since I first got stunned into disbelief when I looked at the data over time.  Even looking at shorter periods can lead to some revelations that many don't make sense at first. Here is the latest data from NCES, published in the Digest of Education Statistics . Please note that this is for informational purposes only, and I've not even attempted to visualize the standard errors in this data, which vary from state-to-state.  There are four views year, all looking at educational attainment by state in 2012 and 2022.   The first shows data on a map: Choose the year, and choose the level of attainment.  Note that the top three categories can be confusing: BA means a Bachelor's degree only; Grad degree means at least a Master's (or higher, of course); and BA or more presumably combines those two.  Again, standard errors might mean the numbers don't always add up perfectly. The second shows the data o...
Post a Comment
Read more