The following data visualizations follow Education Attainment in the United States and seeks to visually illucidate and uncover trends and patterns within the Census data. Our project breaks down this large category of Education by looking at various populations and the numbers of people within the education system in each level of schooling from nursery school to graduate school. The scales of interest explored in our data visualization are the national level, regional level, and state level. In exploring these distinct scales, we seek to expose relations at lower levels that might contribute towards trends at larger levels. Specifically, we are interested in higher education in the United States — how many people pursue a Masters degree, in what states and regions is pursuing a Masters degree most common, and does gender play a role?
We used Census.gov data from 2016 on 'Education Enrollment'. You may find more detailed data tables here.
First, we decided to take a look at the national level to get a sense of how many people in the United States are where in the Education System. In 2016, and out of the 83,054,762 people within the American education system, 4,165,602 were in graduate school. This makes up 5% of the students in America, which compares to the number of students in Nursery school, which is only 1 year long.
Next, we looked at region-level trends of enrollment in university degree programs, undergraduate and graduate. You can click to further inspect state statistics, or judge the region by the size of its square and color — blue indicating a smaller value and yellow indicating a larger value. From this, we see which regions have the most university students, by count and by percent. We also use this visualization to understand if there is a gender bias in university enrollment, and whether or not it differs from region to region and state by state. Almost entirely across the United States, there is a slightly higher percentage of women enrolled in univerities, as you can immediately see by the larger presence of yellow in the female tab.
After looking at the region level statistics, we were interested in breaking the data down further: to the state level. We wanted to compare all of this data side by side, to give a better view of the differences between specific states. This visualization allows us to see more specifically which states have more people enrolled in which part of the education system during 2016, which we are assuming is similar data from year to year. As you can see, the District of Columbia (DC) has the largest percent of college students, undergraduate and graduate, which can be attributed to its large number of universities (20) and its small population (less than 700,000). Other states like Maryland and Massachusetts also have a large percentage of graduate students.
From these three visualizations, we get a sense of the educational landscape in America. From nursery all the way through graduate school, we now understand how many people are in the education system and where. It is clear that only a small percentage of the population pursues Masters degrees, only a fraction of undergraduate students move on to graduate school, and that these numbers and percentages vary from region to region and state to state, but it is not clear why. From here, it would be interesting to observe this data alongside visualizations of the number of universities within each state, and perhaps an income bracket breakdown for each state. With that information, we could further infer potential correlations, which might shed light more disparities and why different states have more graduate students compared to others.