Skip to main content

A Remake of the Pell Institute Data

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have time. --Pascal

And sometimes it's that way with data visualization, too.  What starts out as a simple project--one you think will take a few minutes--gets slightly more complicated.  This morning, I came across this interesting Chronicle of Higher Education story, showing Pell Institute Data on Economic Diversity. If you don't want to look at the article, here is a screen grab of the chart.  Click on it to enlarge.


It's not a bad chart, but I found myself taking more time than I thought I should to figure out the story, which is that for-profit institutions enroll far higher percentages of low-income students than public institutions.  (Another problem with this that I can't fix is that the data are not complete; for instance, there is no data on private Baccalaureate or Master's Institutions included in the set.) Additionally, notice the subtle changes in color when you move from the overall category to any of the institutional types. I think that can be confusing.  And finally, as is the case with all stacked bar charts, it's hard to compare middle values.

The biggest problem, though, is that, there are too many things to take in at once. The story can get lost in the chart.

So I did an attempt at a quick visualization, but a small data set (seven columns by five rows) seems to make it harder to get good insight, and I spent a lot more time on this than I thought I would.

This is still not perfect, of course. For instance, it's hard to compare one institutional type to another, unless you have a good memory.  But clicking the drop down box to change the type of institution shown on the bars, and comparing that to the average (orange lines) seems to work pretty well. 

Let me know what you think: Does this make it easier to see the story?




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

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

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