Today I was teaching in the morning so this whipped out most of day 4 of dashboard week. This was both a blessing and a curse – I enjoyed the time away from my screen however the three hours I had left was not enough time to do everything I would have wanted.
The challenge
Today’s data was fairly easy to download and use – unlike the rest of the days this week. Today we were looking at students at universities in California from 1893 – 1945. The real challenge today was working with an OLD version of Tableau – Tableau 8.3.4 to be exact – this had a few quirks and not all the features we were used to working with.
The preparation
![](https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/content/images/wordpress/2020/01/Annotation-2020-01-09-175458-1024x335.png)
The data didn’t take much preparation as you can see from my workflow above. The only steps I took were:
- Creating a look up table of subjects so I could replace the abbreviations in the original dataset ( I didn’t even use these in my analysis in the end)
- Parsing the date field from a string to a date
Working in Tableau 8 and visualising
As I really didn’t have that much time today, I needed to keep my analysis very simple. After a few simple experiments with gender breakdown and course type, I chose to compare the number registrations at University of California campuses with that of the private universities in the data set.
Although working in Tableau 8 was ok overall, there were a few things that frustrated me like not being able to pick a screen colour!
My final visualisation looked like this:
![](https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/content/images/wordpress/2020/01/Dashboard-week-day-4.jpg)
Insights
Key takeaways from my analysis today were:
- UC became a dominant academic institution for higher education in CA in the first half of the 20th century (NB I don’t think this dataset included all the other universities in California at that time)
- UC student population continued grow and grow most years up until WWII in 1893, however the population of the private universities seemed to stay at a similar level across the time frame.
- World War II really effected the student population of UC however it did not have such a big impact on the private universities.