For our research, we looked at how education affects the labor force participation/unemployment rate. We first looked at the attendance rate. First, we analyzed the zip codes in Chicago vs attendance rates in elementary schools. We graphed the overall median of all the zip codes through a box plot. The median attendance percentage was 93%, with the highest being 96% and the lowest being 88%. The graph also shows one outlier that is at 80%. We then selected the bottom five zip codes with the lowest attendance percentage. The bottom five showed that most of these zip codes had an attendance rate of around 85%, with the one outlier being at less than 80%. These zip codes are all to the South of Chicago.

From finding the correlation between unemployment rate in each zip code and average high school attendance throughout each zip code, we found a correlation of ~-.3, indicating that there isn’t a strong relationship between the two variables. This coefficient can be a result of multiple different influences. For example, just because someone goes to a high school in a certain zip code, does not mean that all of the students that go to that school all live in the same zip code. Even if a student lived in the same zip code as the school they went to, after graduating (or dropping out in some cases), that student could move to another zip code, which would end up impacting the data of the new zip code, and not the zip code of the school. Overall, this makes it difficult to make assumptions or conclusions about schools and zip codes, since the school zip code does not always line up with the zip code of its students and alumni.