This application was created to help users visually explore data related to engineering schools in the United States.
The entry point to the application is a force cluster chart that displays a node for each available school. The "Cluster by" dropdown menu can be used to split the nodes into clusters based on the selected attribute. The "Mode" buttons change the meaning of the nodes. Finally, use the search bar to highlight a specific school in the cluster. You may click on a node to view more in-depth data related to that particular school.
Use the trends tab to view how tuition and enrollment by level, gender, and ethnicity have changed over time for both public and private universities.
Use the school comparison tab to easily compare statistics between two universities.
Please see the about page for more details on how to use this visualization and how our data were collected.
School Mode: In this mode, each node in the cluster represents a single engineering school. The cluster by dropdown allows you to cluster the nodes by school type (public or private) and by tuition (beeswarm plot). Nodes can be clicked on to show additional information related to that particular school in the school profile tab.
Student Mode: In this mode, the gender and ethnic breakdowns of students across all schools in the U.S. are aggregated and we compute the percentage of the student population that each gender-ethnic group makes up. We then categorize 500 students according to these percentages, and display one node for each of the 500 hypothetical students. This provides an easy way to quickly compare the differences in sizes of groups. Nodes can then be clustered by either just gender or just ethnicity.
The purpose of these visualizations is to display aggregate data of Engineering Schools in the United States in a visually interesting and informative way. The visualizations use data obtained from the American Society For Engineering Education (ASEE), and then displays the data in four visualizations, each represented in its own tab: Home, School Directory, Trends, and School Comparison.
As the title would suggest, the Home tab is the starting point of our visualization. The home tab consists of a cluster of circular nodes each representative of an Engineering School in the United States. Users can select from two modes: "Schools" and "Students". When "Schools" mode is active, the size of each node is representative of the total enrollment of that university. A legend is present in the upper right corner of the visualization as to assist in understanding how the sizing of a node compares to the actual population of the school in question. Above the legend, a search bar is present, which allows for autocomplete searching of the data on file. Upon clicking the search button, the searched school name is highlighted. Upon clicking on a node in this mode the visualization will transition to the secondary School Directory Visualization. When "Students" mode is active, there are a total of 500 nodes, which are split into proportions that reflect the national percentages of certain attributes. A select dropdown, found in the top left of the visualization allows for the clustering of the nodes based upon the selected attributes. The selectable attributes change based on the mode. For "Schools" mode, clusterable attributes are "By school", "By public vs. private", and "By tuition". For "Students" Mode clusterable attributes are "By gender & ethnicity", "By gender", and "By gender and Ethnicity".
The School Directory tab showcases area charts and line graphs for the following categories: Tuition Over Time, Graduate vs. Undergraduate Enrollment, Enrollment by Ethnicity and Enrollment by Gender.
A year chart allows for focusing in on the data of select years. The graphs update upon selection to reflect the data for the selected years.
To select a new school, simply return to the home tab and click on the school's corresponding node, or use the search bar.
Note: The enrollment chart reflects the total number of students at the university, while the gender and ethnicity charts reflect only the total number of students in that university's school of engineering.
The School Comparison tab allows for the selection of two schools to be compared side by side on the following values: Type of Institution, Tuition, Enrollment by Level, Enrollment by Gender, and Enrollment by Race/Ethnicity The tables are populated on after searching a specific school's name and the enrollment data is represented specifically by stacked bar charts for each respective category. Hovering over bars will show what data that particular bar represents.
Similar to the School Directory Tab, the Trends tab consists of the average data of each school based on the same categories in the School Directory graphs. The average data is separated by public vs private schools.
A year chart allows for the viewing of specific data over a selected interval.
Note: The enrollment chart reflects the total number of students in universities, while the gender and ethnicity charts reflect only the total number of students in schools of engineering.
The data was obtained from the American Society For Engineering Education (ASEE), which has profiles on most universities in the United States. The data was self-reported by each school to ASEE on a voluntary basis. Some schools opted to not provide certain information, and others may have provided inaccurate data. Schools that did not report data for any year between 1999-2018 were not included in the dataset visualization. When reasonable, some values were interpolated using available data from the school. If a school had what we deemed to be an unreasonable amount of data missing (such that we could not fairly and accurately visualize the school) the school was removed from the data set.