EAI6120 Assignment 4: Create Tableau Dashboards with Higher Education Data
Steps to Complete Assignment 4:
- View the College Scorecard public website, download the data, and download the data dictionary. (Optional, butencouraged:read the glossary).
- Visit the NCES IPEDs website, download the “F2” financial data, and download the data dictionary.
- (Optional: transform data in R before ingesting it into Tableau)
- Use Tableau to prototype an “analytical” dashboard.
- Use Tableau to prototype a “strategic” dashboard.
- Write a brief document explaining your thought process and choices for your dashboards.
Deliverables Required for Submission:
Text document that explains your thought process
A link to your public-facing Tableau dashboard (preferred) OR
a PowerPoint / Google Presentation document with pictures / screen shots of your Tableau dashboard components.
DO NOT SEND ME YOUR TABLEAU WORKBOOK (.TWB) FILE! I will not accept it.
The First Data Set You Will Use: The College Scorecard
The College Scorecard is a data disclosure and reporting effort created by the Obama administration, focusing on higher education data. It reports key data and metrics on scorecards in a public facing website atwww.collegescorecard.ed.gov(Links to an external site.). The target audience for the public facing scorecards are college-going students and their families, and high school guidance counselors and administrators that help students with the college search and application process.
College Scorecard uses data from a variety of sources inside the U.S. government, including the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. NCES IPEDS collects and reports data about individual higher education institutions in the U.S. (there are about 7,500 total).
You will need thedataused to make the College Scorecard, which is here:
https://data.ed.gov/dataset/college-scorecard-all-data-files-through-6-2020/resources
Click the “ZIP - Most Recent Institution-Level Data” on the left-hand side of the web page to download the data. This data set is somewhat large!
Thedata dictionaryfor these data is here:
https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/documentation/(Links to an external site.)
Click the “Data Dictionary” button to get a spreadsheet with the data dictionary.
Use the data dictionary to browse variables and consider what you might want to use in your dashboard.The data dictionary has a tab labeled “institution_data_dictionary” that includes information on the variables contained in the data CSV file.The column named “dev-category” is a good way to quickly browse through the variables. “Variable Name” is what the variable will be named in the CSV file that you load into Tableau / R.
I encourage you to read a basic glossary of the most common measures that the Scorecard reports on, see it here at the following link. It may help you decide what kinds of measures you’d like to focus on and what are usually considered for higher education decisions:
https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/glossary/(Links to an external site.)
The Second Data Set You Will Use: NCES IPEDS Financial Data “F2”
What is IPEDS?
From the IPEDS website (https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/about-ipeds(Links to an external site.)):IPEDS is the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System... IPEDS gathers information from every college, university, and technical and vocational institution that participates in the federal student financial aid program...[institutions] report data onenrollments, program completions, graduation rates, faculty and staff, finances, institutional prices, and student financial aid.
We will be focusing on the “F2” financial data for 2019 to create a strategic dashboard.
See here to view all of the years and survey components available:
https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/datacenter/DataFiles.aspx?goToReportId=7
The data we are interested in is the second row, the Data File labeled as“F1819_F2”.
Click this file to download it as a CSV. You will also want the “Dictionary” file that goes with it - see the link in the right-most column.
View the “Dictionary”; in the introduction tab you’ll see this description of the data:
This data file contains institutional finance data for institutions... Finance data includes institutional revenues by source, expenditures by functional categories, expenditures by natural classification categories, endowments, and assets and liabilities.
In the data dictionary file, view the “varlist” and “description” tabs. Pay special attention to “varname” as you will need it to work with these data.