Higher Ed Data Stories

What kind of jobs can I get if I major in English? (Lots) Do I have to major in science to go to medical school? (No) Do actors have to go to a Theater program? (No). All these sound like conventional wisdom, but now, thanks to my friends at Human Capital Research Corporation , we have some better answers.  The data set they put together is based on The American Community Survey (ACS) of the Census Bureau, a small but statistically significant sample of the US Population.  It asks questions that include occupation and college major (for those who are working, and for those who have a bachelor's degree).  The data below contains over 3 million individual responses to these questions (for people in the labor force between the ages of 25 and 60 with a bachelor's degree). One the first dashboard (using the tabs across the top), you see two views.  On the blue chart on the left, choose a major (cluster) at the top.  The chart below will show you the professions...

Recently, I received a message from Akil Bello who pointed out a data visualization he had seen.  It was originally posted to Reddit , but later was edited to eliminate the red-green barrier that people with color-blindness face.  The story was here , using a more suitable blue-red scheme. There's nothing really wrong with visualizing test scores, of course.  I do it all the time.  But many of the comments on Reddit suggest that somehow the tests have real meaning, as a single variable devoid of any context.  I don't think that's a good way to analyze data. So I went to the NY City Department of Education to see what I can find.  There is a lot of good stuff there, so I pulled some of it down and began taking a look at it.  Here's what I found. On the first chart, I wanted to see if the SAT could be described as an outcome of other variables, so I put the average SAT score on the y-axis, and began with a simple measure: Eighth grade math and En...

Much of what I post here is slightly modified from what I use at work, and this is no exception.  Here at DePaul (like most universities) the biggest single slice of enrollment comes from our own state, and it's important to know what's going to be happening to the student markets in the future. So I downloaded data from The Illinois State Board of Education showing enrollments for two years: 2010--2011 and 2015-2016 to see how things have changed over time, and to get a glimpse of the future.  This is a more granular look than the WICHE data I visualized recently , but it's also not actual projections going forward, but rather just numbers; projections require a lot of time and mathematics skills, neither of which I have.  I would have liked to gone deeper and farther with this, but the data are messy , and even things like School District IDs have changed over time. There are four views using the tabs across the top: First by region, then county-by-county, and then ...