Back in December I critiqued a viz about the gap between the Russell Group of universities and several of the rest.  The postgrad.com Data Visualization Challenge sparked me work on part 2 of my analysis.

Over here in the States, when you hear of Oxford or Cambridge, you think of exclusivity and an incredible (and incredibly expensive) education.  I never knew much about the UK educational system until recently, thanks to the Guardian Datablog. 

I’ve once again turned to the flexibility of Tableau (the parameters feature is a huge help) to create this viz which details the gap between what is essentially the rich and the poor.  Play around with the colors, shape sizes and the scatter plot.  Click on a bubble and its stats will appear at the bottom. 

You’ll certainly find something interesting including:

• Kings College London has the highest % of free school meal students, but only at 5.3% (the average is 6.47%)
• Oxford is indeed elitism, at least the data suggest such: 47% of students are independent while only 0.8% are FSM
• 60 of the 87 schools in the dataset (69%) have a below average % of independent students, none of the schools being in the Russell Group

What do you see?

I first saw the visualization below on the Chart Porn blog, which linked to the original article on The Huffington Post. This is an excellent visualization that effectively uses colors to emphasizes the highest poverty rates and provides information in a user-friendly format when you mouse over the map. The only thing I wish it would do is allow you to click on a state and drill down into the county-level data.

Immediately popping out to me are the poverty rates around the lower Mississippi River and Eastern Kentucky/Central Appalachia regions. A quick Google search turned up a documentary by Diane Sawyer that aired on ABC's 20/20 in February 2009.

The oldest mountains in America are rich in natural beauty with their raging creeks, steep hollows and old pines. They are also one of the poorest, most disadvantaged regions in America. Central Appalachia has up to three times the national poverty rate, an epidemic of prescription drug abuse, the shortest life span in the nation, toothlessness, cancer and chronic depression.

From The Huffington Post:

In 2009, poverty among Americans reached its highest level in 51 years. The states hardest hit include Louisiana, Mississippi and District of Columbia. States with the lowest poverty statistics include, Wyoming, Hawaii, New Jersey and Minnesota.

Roll over each state to see its poverty rate.