This project was conducted by Reed Schubert, Ngelek Thayai, Dylan Evans, and Khizar Qureshi for the Digital Arts & Humanities: Hacking the Humanities final project. This project was advised through Professor Austin Mason.
In this project, we scraped data from the Carleton Zoobooks to analyze the differences in students coming from states with high poverty levels before and after COVID.
Specifically, we aimed to create a visualizaton by using Social Explorer, where our base map is the Population in Poverty Total in the United States. We are representing each student by a year on the map and we have a slider, where sliding right will show the map during the years 2020-2024 and the sliding left will show the map during the years 2015-2019.
We preprocessed our data by using Google sheets and Geocoding extension.
For our data analysis, we focused on student admissions in the Southwestern region of the United States, as this area exhibited a higher poverty rate compared to the rest of the country. We compared admission counts before and after COVID to analyze the impact of the pandemic on student enrollment.
For a more in-depth discussion about our process look at our process page.
In conclusion, while correlation does not imply causation, it is notable that many students admitted to Carleton College come from similar counties. Our analysis focused on the Southwestern region due to its higher poverty rates, allowing us to examine how socioeconomic factors may influence college admissions, particularly before and after COVID. Understanding these patterns helps highlight potential disparities in access to higher education.