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Showing posts from July, 2014

Where Students in the US were enrolled, 2012

A while ago, I wrote about the wide range of institutions in the US post-secondary education system.  The point I was trying to make was that the prestigious, extraordinarily selective institutions you hear about all the time represent just the top of iceberg when it comes to colleges and universities in the US. That visualization counted institutions, for the most part. But another way to look at this is to show where students enroll, and I think this can be equally surprising, and, I hope a bit enlightening.  So take a look at this, again using Tableau Story Boards.  Each gray tab across the top shows the data presented in a different way; keep clicking from left to right to see the interesting tidbits this data reveals to us. Did you know, for instance, that one out of every eleven undergraduate college students in the US (excluding for-profits) enrolls at a California Community College?  Or that there are no private, not-for-profit colleges in Wyoming? Or that the state with

Changes in Faculty Salaries Over Time

Note: The first version of this had a bug; I forgot to add the "Gender" filter to the final view, so everything was showing up at about 3 times the actual value.  It's fixed now, with a thanks to Tableau Zen Master Allan Walker of Utah State University  for catching it. While I was at it, I added a second view to show differences by gender. The last time I wrote about the salaries of educators , I said I'd never do it again: There were too many people who didn't know the difference between nominal and constant dollars ("No one made $75,000 in 1980!") and those who didn't understand averages ("How could the average in that state be $60,000? I only make $53,000!"). But this is interesting, I think in light of discussions about the rapid increase in tuition over time (in case you've been under a rock recently.)  It shows the changes in average (there's that word again) faculty salaries by rank since 1975, in either nominal or const

A DataViz Reboot: WICHE Projections of High School Graduates

A while ago, I used Tableau Software to visualize trends in High School Graduates provided by WICHE .  I think it was good, but with Tableau's new Story Points feature (in which you create pages of the story you want to tell) I think it's an even better story.  If you scroll through these points, you can get a sense of how America has become more diverse, and how those changes vary pretty dramatically by region.  That last point, especially, is often lost on people who talk about changing national demographics. Just like all politics is local , almost all enrollment is too. So, first, if you want, look at the old version , then take a look at the new visualization below.  What do you think? Learn About Tableau Learn About Tableau

Where do International Students Enroll in the US?

In recent years, Colleges and Universities have turned their focus to International Enrollment as a source of new students. But is that a good idea?  It depends on what type of institution you are, apparently. This data comes from the Institute of International Education's Open Doors project, and while it's valuable, it still points out the problems with pre-aggregated data.  On the site, you'll find good stuff about students by enrollment level (graduate and undergraduate); you'll find good information about enrollment by institution; and you'll find information like this about enrollment by Carnegie Classification.  But you can only ask one question of each data set.  The result is that this information is intriguing, but not granular enough: For instance, what if I presumed that graduate students would naturally flock to doctoral and research institutions and a) I wanted to test that theory or b)I  just wanted to look at undergraduates to see where they went?