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Showing posts from August, 2015

How Pell Grant Recipients Fare at America's 80 Largest Universities

On my train ride in this morning, I saw an article posted on Twitter about Pell Graduation rates at the 80 largest universities in America.  If you want to look at a boring table of static data, just click here . But I wanted to see if there were any patterns, so I copied the table, pasted it into Excel and then opened in Tableau to visualize it.  I think it tells an interesting story, although the data set is unfortunately limited, and with no key to merge the data with another set, it loses some potential. Start by looking at the first view.  For each institution, there are three columns: The overall six-year graduation rate; the six-year graduation rate of Pell recipients, and the spread, with the values on spread sorted from low to high.  In this instance, a negative number means Pell students graduate at a higher rate than the student body overall, and a positive number means just the opposite.  As you scroll down the list from top to bottom, ask yourself what makes the patter

Watch Out, Guys

Women have made tremendous strides in educational attainment of bachelor's degrees in the last half of 20th century and the first decade of the 21st.  And even though doctoral degrees have lagged behind, we can see dramatic changes there as well. Take a look at this visualization using National Science Foundation Data  ( this link downloads the data for you in Excel  as Table 14).  What you see over time is a dramatic increase in the number of women who earned doctorates since 1983, but also a shift in the percentage distributions. Women are now the majority in Life Sciences, Education, and Social Sciences, and close to dead even with men in all fields except Physical Sciences and Engineering. The second view (using the tabs across the top) shows doctorate by broad discipline over time.  Use the filter at the top to compare men and women, or to see the totals.  Note the tremendous percentage growth in women in engineering since 1983: From 124 to 2,051, an increase of over 1,50