Now Interactive: Transitions into the Workforce

How does a community college major relate to the eventual industry of employment? Now you can interact and explore the relationship between Iowa community college students and their eventual employment sector or your computer or mobile device. This is an update to a static poster I developed a couple of years ago. There is good […]

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 […]

Oh the Humanities

The New York Times has an article on the hardships of a humanities Ph.D. Among the highlights: it takes an average of 9 years to finish a humanities Ph.D. (if you do); high amount of debt (over $25,000); and the old age of graduates (35 years-old) which means less time available to recover all of […]

K-12 Expenditures per Student and Performance

Below is a plot showing the relationship between the density of students receiving free and reduced lunch and the percent making progress in mathematics in Iowa school districts. Families with limited income are eligible for free and reduced lunch, so it’s a proxy for poverty. The regression line shows the negative relationship between free and […]

K-12 Expenditures and Enrollment Size

From a working paper by Dan Otto on the economies of scale in Iowa’s K-12 schools: First, expenditures per student generally rise as district sizes fall below about 750 students. Given no additional knowledge about educational processes, it is possible there are economies of scale relative to school district size for these districts. It also […]