Student Choice

DATA SITE: DATAUSA Computer Science

Purpose

The purpose of this data is to explain computer science as a degree in the US. It mostly has a lot of information pertaining to universities around the US on various information. It also gives meaningful information about employment in the US pertaining to computer science.

What is the Data

As mentioned before, the data comprises two main categories: institutions and employment. For institutions, it gives information about which institutions award the most degrees, the average costs for attending the institutions, the county which awards the most degrees and which counties are growing in awarded degrees.

Going into each visualization, this one shows the institutions with the most awarded degrees in Computer Science. Interestingly enough, UIC is actually among one of the mid to higher institutions that awards the most degrees. The visualization in this graph is really nice to look at because you can clearly see the different categories for each type of institution separated by colors and blocks. The sizes of the blocks make it easy to tell who awards higher degrees. When hovering over a block, you will be able to tell the institution of that certain block. I like that it only shows the mid to bigger sized blocks with text because it makes it easier to read instead of trying to read small blocks with text overlapping. It gives the bigger picture of the institutions that give out more degrees.

Along with that, we can compare the top awarded institutions with their county in the visualizations below.

Based on the certain counties the institution is located in, you can look at the area in the map along with the amount awarded in that county. This will help give a better idea on which area a student might want to apply for in terms of choosing an institution. You can also see the growth of degrees awarded over time. The first image shows the degrees awarded in 2013 while the second one shows the degrees awarded in 2019. In terms of visualization design here, the color coding is simple and it is easy to figure out the different colors and ranges for degrees awarded. Given only a small range of years, I think clicking on the years is good and clear but if there were more years, a slider would likely be better.

Then finally, one huge factor one can look into is the tuition costs for at least the top institutions.

In this case, you are able to compare prices of in state, out of state, and amount of graduates over the years. You can compare these with the map counties to get a better feel about how tuition in that area might cost. In terms of visualization, it would be better if there was a way to filter through each of the top universities to match up with each other. From this diagram, it only gives limited information.

In terms of the employment section, there is various great information that can be used to help a student make a decision.

This gives information about computer science and general wages. You can see it change over the years with a nice animation. To look in more depth though, you can look for specific areas of the map that have the average wages by area. This will give a better idea of where someone is located might want to go for work later or the amount of compensation they might get in a specific area of living.

Then, if below two visualizations are just easy to look at, visualizations that show the shares of graduates in computer science by industry and also types of occupation graduates go into after a computer science degree.

I think these two visualizations are easy to read and look at the different proportions to get a better feel at where people are heading to after graduating.

How was the data collected

The data was collected through O*NET, which is a source that helps with occupational information. Though, it doesn’t state how they specifically collected this data, I would believe the data to be accurate since it is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor.

Type of End Users for this Visualization

The type of users that would be looking into this data would likely be employers or people in the industry looking to expand their company size or branch out into different areas. Another type of user that would look into this data is students. Especially the institutions section, it can really help students determine where they want to attend an institution. Deciding where to go has many factors such as location, tuition costs, rank of program, and more. Especially if a student decides that they want to go into computer science as a major, this is really helpful to look at to get a better idea of where they might want to apply. There are many institutions at different levels and sometimes it’s not very clear on a starting point. This can also help students during their last years in the institution because they can look at the employment section. This can give the student, who might not have a clear idea of what they want to do, ideas about what type of job they want to go towards and in what location. Different states and counties have higher or lower cost of living and so just being able to look at the map and see the more concentrated areas might be helpful for someone looking for a career after institutions.

Questions people want to ask and Finding the Answer

Some of the questions people might want to ask are what are the top institutions in the US for computer science. Through the visualization that shows the most degrees awarded, they can start there. Since these tend to award more degrees in general, the student will have confidence that these are fairly good colleges to start at when trying to find success in their careers.

Some students might ask about finding the best area to live in for institutions. They might also have some restrictions on where they’d prefer to go. In this case, the student should be able to go to the degrees awarded by county map to see which areas are best for their own situation.

Some other questions students might ask when getting close to graduating is figuring out what types of job is out there and how popular each type of job is. For this, the student can look at the occupation by shared visualization which shows the highest percentages of occupation computer science majors go into. This can help narrow things down more and help them figure out what they might want to explore so that they have a better feel about what they want to do.