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Showing posts from August, 2020

A multi-dimensional look at diversity in American colleges and universities

I bought another camera, so I had hoped to spend the weekend out and about doing some photography , but this weekend is one of those rare ones in the Pacific Northwest where the temperature is cracking 100 °  F.   So I decided to stay inside, for the most part, and take a look at a data set I had downloaded for some others at the university. My original intent in doing this was to refresh the visualization I had done on Simpson's Diversity Index.  It's the way an ecologist looks at the diversity of an eco-system, and it puts the question in a new light: If you select two students from the population, what are the chances they'll be different along a specified dimension, in this case, ethnicity?  The first time I did it, I calculated the index at the institution level in Excel, then imported the data into Tableau.  That works, but you can't look at the data in any way other than by institution.  So, if I wanted to look at states, or regions, or public or private univers