Education scholar, Gary Rhoads, was the lead author on a report released by Center for the Future of Higher Education, an organization that Dr. Rhoads leads. The main thrust is the troubling decline in community college funding and it’s impact on student access. Specifically, that the reducing the budget has put caps on programs and […]
Author: Tom
Data Nouveau: Ideas for Visualizations
Starting a project where you need to make a series of graphs or a visualization can be frustrating. One of the hardest tasks is to find a theme, a style which you want to use. Though minimalism is the dominate “style” in data visualization, there is a lot of approaches to any graphical approaches. So I’ve […]
Measuring Transitions Into the Workforce as a Form of Accountability
My new publication in November’s IR Applications, which is published by the Association for Institutional Research: This paper explores the relationship between student major and industry of employment and its application to higher education accountability. Data provided by statewide longitudinal data systems (SLDS) have enabled state educational agencies and colleges to follow students into the workforce. While most studies have […]
Poverty Estimates for Children by Iowa School Districts
U.S. Census Bureau released poverty and income estimates for small areas, including counties and school districts, in an interactive map. Here is a picture of poverty estimates for children (between 5 and 17 years-old) by Iowa school district. Darker areas represent a higher proportion of kids in poverty. Pockets of high poverty, 30%+, are predominately […]
More on Midwest Urbanization
Kyle Munson from The Des Moines Register wrote a featured article on the changing population base in the Midwest based on new Census data. Below is the graph from the article: The lower-left graphic–dependence on manufacturing jobs–is one of the first items I mention to folks when discussing Iowa’s economy. Rural areas rely more on manufacturing […]
Hollowing Out?
Well-written books like Hollowing Out the Middle and Caught in the Middle have noted the net outward migration of education populations to urban areas. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago shows that real per capita income shows there is not as much disparity in real income per capita between the upper Midwest metro areas and non-metro areas […]
Earnings and Unemployment by Major
Wall Street Journal posted data from the venerable Center on Education and the Workforce on earnings and unemployment by college major. There is a relative floor at $40,000 with a wide variation of unemployment (poor clinical psychology). There is a negative correlation between earnings and unemployment rate, but it might be too presumptuous to presume […]
Battling Bad Science
A few important statistical concepts are mentioned here, including observational versus randomized trails (randomization apparently is mentioned in Daniel 1:12); causality; publication bias; and a “funnel” plot.
How to find salaries for a new job
There use to be a lot of talk about H1-B visas. Mostly the conversation focused on whether workers born overseas were somehow “stealing” jobs, but in reality, it reflected an insufficient number of trained workers in a given sector. Regardless of that feeling, you can use H1-B visa applications to your advantage while job-hunting. H1-B […]
The challenge of finding notes
I ran across an old notebook from my days at the American Institute for Economic Research–the days when I studied and wrote in the philosophy of science–with a note the back pag: In describing the human body we must realize the whole and particulars. The whole is the body we see and touch. It is […]