Prospects: Who Will Reach College Age in the Next 14 Years?
Posted at 4:51 p.m., Feb. 23, 2014
An interactive dotmap allows users to select two racial or ethnic groups and see where they do and don't overlap within a given area.
An interactive dotmap allows users to select two racial or ethnic groups and see where they do and don't overlap within a given area.
A summary section shown for each state or county describes some of the most distinctive characteristics we found for that area.
Census data of ethnic breakdown by age allowed me to show how much more or less diverse an area's incoming college class might get in the next several years.
The changing ethnic and socioeconomic makeup of America's children has all kinds of effects on the country's educational institutions and is the sort of thing that's easy to describe with recruiters' anecdotes and provosts' gut feelings. My task was to quantify some of these changes and make them more accessible.
Using some Census tables that break down the population by racial/ethnic background and individual year of age (e.g., 4 years old, 17 years old), I managed to show the differences in demographics between some areas' younger and older children as well as the varying distributions of specific ethnic groups in those areas, both to help readers see those changes and to help reporters better focus their efforts as they explained what this meant for our audience.