The Hemingway Version of a Faulkner Story

Note: Tableau Guru Jeffrey Shaffer suggested I change from a red/green palette to one that's better for people who cannot distinguish between those two colors. I changed it to include one view with orange/purple, but kept the original as well.

My undergraduate degree is in English Literature, and so I've read a lot of things I didn't like. In one American literature class I remember, the two heavyweights of the course were William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, and the difference in their literary styles made an impression on me. I'm reminder of this exchange of criticisms:

Faulkner: "Hemingway has never been known to use a word that might send the reader to a dictionary."

Hemingway: "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?"

And so it goes with Story Telling With Data. I downloaded an interesting data table from the Digest of Education Statistics, and worked for a long time, trying to find some interesting way to display the data. I had a story board with four dashboards, but nothing was telling anything that was compelling. Part of the problem is that the patterns are hidden in the 50 states and three different types of FTE enrollment: Public, Private, and Private For-Profit.

And then it happened, and the charts tell the story almost without words. On the left is change in FTE (Full-time Equivalent) enrollment by state from 2000 to 2010, broken out by sector. Notice: Almost every state in all three views are green, showing positive numbers. The worst is the khaki color, showing low increases.

In the right column, it's a very different story. Lots of red, concentrated, interestingly enough, in publics and the for-profit sector. You can hover over a state for details, but the patterns are pretty clear, even without doing so.

There. A story, with no big words, and just a few pictures.

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The Highly Rejective Colleges

If you're not following Akil Bello on Twitter, you should be. His timeline is filled with great insights about standardized testing, and he takes great effort to point out racism (both subtle and not-so-subtle) in higher education, all while throwing in references to the Knicks and his daughter Enid, making the experience interesting, compelling, and sometimes, fun. Recently, he created the term " highly rejective colleges " as a more apt description for what are otherwise called "highly selective colleges." As I've said before, a college that admits 15% of applicants really has a rejections office, not an admissions office. The term appears to have taken off on Twitter, and I hope it will stick. So I took a look at the highly rejectives (really, that's all I'm going to call them from now on) and found some interesting patterns in the data. Take a look: The 1,132 four-year, private colleges and universities with admissions data in IPEDS are incl

Freshman Migration, 1986 to 2020

(Note: I discovered that in IPEDS, Penn State Main Campus now reports with "The Pennsylvania State University" as one system. So when you'd look at things over time, Penn State would have data until 2018, and then The Penn....etc would show up in 2020. I found out Penn State main campus still reports its own data on the website, so I went there, and edited the IPEDS data by hand. So if you noticed that error, it should be corrected now, but I'm not sure what I'll do in years going forward.) Freshman migration to and from the states is always a favorite visualization of mine, both because I find it a compelling and interesting topic, and because I had a few breakthroughs with calculated variables the first time I tried to do it. If you're a loyal reader, you know what this shows: The number of freshman and their movement between the states. And if you're a loyal viewer and you use this for your work in your business, please consider supporting the costs

The College Finder

Note: A few people have commented on slow loading with the visualization. If you have troubles, click here to be taken right to the visualization . It should open in a new tab and you can follow along from there. This is always a popular post with high school counselors, IECs, parents, and students who are looking for general information on degrees awarded, or a very specific combination of academic programs, location, and other institutional characteristics. It uses IPEDS data I downloaded as soon as I can when it became available (and before a looming government shutdown), and shows all 1,700 majors recognized by the federal government in the IPEDS system, using CIP codes, and the number of degrees awarded by college in any selected area. For instance, you might have a question about which college awards the most degrees in French Language and Literature: A few clicks, and you find it's the University of Arizona. If you want a colder climate, choose the Great Lakes region,

Higher Ed Data Stories

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