Do student's profit when colleges do?

This week at the Data School is Dashboard Week. An intensive 5 day stretch where every morning we are assigned a dataset and every afternoon we are expected to present a dashboard with our findings and how we got there. For our first day we have been given data from the U. S. Department of Education College Scorecard. This dataset is massive– it includes information from all private and public institutions from undergrad to postgrad on a variety of topics, such as retention rates, student debt, university revenue, admissions and demographics just to name a few. Sorting through this data is overwhelming and dizzying. One could spend a lifetime studying it, but I have 6 hours so I know the first thing I must do is: 

SCOPE! SCOPE! SCOPE!

I need to pick one topic and trim the over 3000 fields to a dozen at most to work with. I am immediately piqued by the university revenue field. I have always found it to be an interesting topic that schools can profit from students. I have always been of the belief that education should be free and have found it strange that a school is not only a place of learning, but a place of business as well. 

As I continue perusing I see another field discussing student earning post graduation and wonder if schools that perform well financially pass on the good fortune to their student body. I think I have found my question:

Do schools with higher revenues lead to students who earn more?

I loosely imagined a dashboard that would look something like this:

To manage the data I loaded it up into Alteryx. While looking through the Data Dictionary I found my relevant columns of interest. Information about the schools, such as name and location. There revenue and operational cost. The average student debt post graduating as well as the average student earning over time. I also found out that the average student earns $38,461 after graduating. 

I renamed my columns of interest to more understandable names. For example GT_THRESHOLD_P6 which contained information on what percent of students were making 150% greater than the poverty line 6 years after graduating was renamed to Greater Than Poverty 6 years. 

This data also came in as only string type so I converted the numeric fields. Additional datatype management had to be done once the data was brought into Tableau, including changing location data to have a geographic role. And changing numeric data from discrete to continuous. 

Honestly, the most time consuming was getting the data where I wanted it. Once I had the data and the dashboard rough draft I just had to piece it together. Check it out here. See if you can find your college!

And to answer my question– No, student's don't always profit when universities profit. For profit schools account for 38% of universities and 41% of all revenue generated, however, their students make on average $10,000 less than their public school counterparts. Public schools account for 32% of all schools, but only 15% of revenue and their graduates make on average $40,000 10 years after graduating.

Author:
Salome Grasland
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