New York Times reports that Harvard rescinded admission offers to 10 students (link). These kids allegedly engaged in horrible behavior on "private" chatrooms online. Not reported is how Harvard admission officers got a hold of such information. Is it possible there are jealous classmates? I am not condoning the bad behavior - I put this link up to remind people: (a) no data are private, not even "deleted" data (b)…
A few weeks ago, the New York Times Upshot team published a set of charts exploring the relationship between school quality, home prices and commute times in different regions of the country. The following is the chart for the New...
Most of my friends with families fret over school quality when deciding where to buy their homes. It's well known that good school districts are also associated with expensive houses. A feedback cycle is at work here: home prices surge where there are good schools; only richer people can afford to buy such homes; wealth brings other advantages, and so the schools tend to have better students, which leads to…
The World Economic Forum published this chart: The "EF EPI Score" is a measure of English proficiency. So the evidence is clear as day: "Better English and Income Go Hand in Hand," as their headline blares. Last time I was in the New York subway, the panhandler spoke good English. What's a blogger to do? I pulled out the EPI scores from the EPI report, and downloaded the Gross National…
Michael Bales and his associates at Cornell are working on a new visual tool for citations data. This is an area that is ripe for some innovation. There is a lot of data available but it seems difficult to gain...
I've said it in Numbersense (the chapter on school rankings), and here it happens again. According to the New York Times (link), Harvard Law School decided to allow applicants to submit GRE test scores instead of LSAT test scores. The announced purpose is to "encourage more students in the United States and internationally from a greater degree of disciplines to apply". The school has a fixed cohort size, 560 per…
(This is a submission from reader Lawrence Mayes. Thank you Lawrence!) I came across this unusual graphical representation of the destinations of scholarship students: [Kaiser here: The charts are hidden inside an annoying Flash app and it seems that the...
Yesterday's post attracted a few good comments. Several readers don't like the data used in the NAEP score chart. The authors labeled the metric "gain in NAEP scale scores" which I interpreted to be "gain scores," a popular way of...
This chart is in the Sept/Oct edition of Harvard Magazine: Pretty standard fare. It even is Tufte-sque in the sparing use of axes, labels, and other non-data-ink. Does it bug you how much work you need to do to understand...
