I was particularly interested in looking at the children’s income distribution in relation to the parent’s income distribution. I thought it was interesting that most children don’t earn as much as their parents since many people go to school and work hard so that the next generation can have an easier life. In the graph above, students who went to higher-tiered schools earned more. Although the only variables in the graph are college tier and the median child individual earnings in 2014, I think it would be interesting to also examine whether region impacts the data and the probability that the child will end up in the same percentile as their parents or even move into a different percentile than their parents. By looking at these variables, we can see whether children are in the same or different income percentile as their parents and how college tiers and region can impact this.

Describe what you imagine our collective equality of opportunity project might look like when it’s finished. Describe three or four main sections of that site with a brief description of what sorts of questions or subjects they might address.

[Hit publish and shut my laptop for the night last night, but I guess I shut down too quickly and it never finished publishing. For the sake of record keeping, publishing it now.]

Let’s tag these “eopsketch“

As we grabble through where we would like to take this project, I believe that race is a very salient aspect of the major disparities in opportunities, and even further, just plain accessibility. Whether it be through the systemic issues that face predominantly minority communities (heavy policing, bad school systems, criminalizing misunderstood kids and teenagers etc.), there is a clear need for addressing issues of equal opportunity. Race would highlight a lot of the shortcomings of higher education (and even to backtrack, education from elementary school upwards). We can not only place the burden on these higher education institutions, but realize that disproportionate opportunity is engrained in so much more than our education system.

So, maybe I cheated on this one.  I’ll let you decide. Above is my sketch of what I envision our data visualization to look like. This is a rough visualization of even that, so maybe that is why I don’t feel so bad about this. I honestly am not sure what else it would look like, but maybe that speaks to my lack of imagination. We currently have a strong understanding of which schools are doing a really good job of helping students move up the income ladder. What we don’t know is why some schools do so well or what the key elements are that enable schools to improve in terms of their mobility statistics. Hopefully we will be able to use the data (and some cool tools) to see what those elements are.

My idea for how we could visualize the Opportunity Project data is dividing into groups focused on data from the institutions in a specific geographic area. As I reflected on my own educational experiences as well as those of people I have grown up with in the Southeast, I wondered if geographical regions have a significant effect on mobility rates and low-income access to education.

The graph pictured above only represents the data for institutions in Alabama but as you can see at the bottom of the image, I have created data charts for all 10 states that the Association of American Geographers classify as “Southeastern” (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia).

I think it would be interesting to create similar charts for institutions in the West, Southwest, Midwest, and Northeast and to compare how the data differs among institutions within the same region as well as how the data differs among the different regions in total.