Preview: From Major to Targeted Clusters

The state of Iowa has established three targeted industry clusters: advanced manufacturing; bioscience; and information solutions. How have Iowa’s community colleges been supplying the industry? Above is an ideogram showing the path from program major (left) to targeted cluster (right). Obviously bioscience is being well-stocked, mostly from health science majors. I’m a bit surprised though […]

Preview: Community College Finances – Tufte Scatterplot

I’ve actually shown this graph before at a State Board of Education meeting last year. I don’t think it was received as well as I had hoped. Many people were worried about the “complexity” of the diagram and I did hear some murmuring when I flipped to the slide. Below is the image of the […]

Preview: Five-year In-state Retention Rate

Ever get a letter from your alma mater asking what you’ve been up to since you graduated? That data is used to see how well the college has been doing. It’s especially important for public colleges to see if most graduates stick around. Ever send one back? No? Well, most don’t. But that’s a pain […]

Fall Enrollment 2009 Presentation

The Iowa Department of Education released the Community College Enrollment Report for Fall 2009. Enrollment exceeded 100,000 students for the first time in the fall semester due to a dramatic year-to-year increase. Below is the presentation given to the state board and the full report can be found here. I’ll write later on the fall […]

Visualizing Transitions into the Workforce Presentation

This presentation was given at the MidAIR 2009 conference in Kansas City. An earlier post highlighted a poster associated with this project. This presentation highlights the methodology and reasoning behind the methodology. I’ve posted scripts and other materials to the project’s webpage.

In Depth: What We Said

Each year the Iowa Department of Education publishes The Annual Condition of Iowa’s Community Colleges. In 2008 I was a part of a major redesign which included adding meaningful narrative and emphasis on graphical representation of data. As we prepare the 2009 edition we are evaluating last years report. We had a few goals for […]

Preview: Visualizing Transitions into the Workforce

Today the Iowa Department of Education and Iowa Workforce Development released “Visualizing Transitions into the Workforce” poster. In short, DE and IWD partnered to follow students from Iowa community colleges into the workforce. The poster shows how specific majors lead to employment in various sectors in Iowa’s economy. The findings are discussed in the full […]

Preview: Visualizing Transitions to the Workforce

The Iowa Department of Education and Iowa Workforce Development have teamed together to track students from community college into the workforce. While we’ve looked at returns to degree and in-state retention rate, we wanted to see where kids were working. In short, we looked at majors and tracked them into the industry. We aggregated majors […]