Higher Ed Data Stories

You can look at a lot of places on this blog to find the story of women and the increases in educational attainment over time, but perhaps none is so compelling as this one.  It was very rare for women to have college degrees in the 1940's and 1950's , but even rarer to find doctors, lawyers, and dentists who were women. As you'll see below, that all changed in the late 1960's and early 1970's.  What happened? It's probably a lot of things, but you could probably do worse than to point to birth control as a major contributing factor. There are four views of the data from the Digest of Educational Statistics : View 1 shows all degrees over time to men and women; the top via stacked bars, and the bottom using line charts.  The top chart shows the dramatic increase in degrees to women; the bottom shows that in 1955-56, almost all degrees (blue line) were awarded to men (purple line.) View 2 shows the same data, presented a different way.  On the top chart,

Note: You should view this on a tablet or desktop. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) has just published the 9th version of " Knocking on the Door ," a look at demographic projections of high school graduates in the US.  And several organizations have already published interesting views of the data, like this one on the WICHE site and this one on Hechinger Report . As I make my case for more self-service BI, these are great examples of what I call the 80/80 rule: Eighty percent of what an analyst will give you is not what you need as a practitioner; and 80% of your questions won't be answered when someone else does the analysis for you.  So I took the data ( and allow me to complain a little bit about putting data for 50 states and DC in 51 worksheets in an Excel workbook, WICHE ) and spent a lot of time restructuring it for analysis.  Then I started asking my questions, and came up with 6 views, in an attempt to provide practitioners maxi