html`

Dataset: College Majors Data

This dataset is from American Community survey 2010-2012 Public Use Microdata Series (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-economic-guide-to-picking-a-college-major/).

It contains majors-list, all-ages, recent-grads, grad-students, women-stem, and college-majors-rscript.

Analysis Questions:

1. What is the most popular major category?

2. What is the most popular major among recent female graduates?

3. Do male and female students have the same proficiency in choosing stem majors?

4. What is the relationship between the ratio of female students and incomes?

1. What is the most popular major category?

From the visualization above, we can figure out that Business is the most popular major category. Is it because it is easy to find a job if study business?

I realized I made a mistake: I should not use the sum of the employed number since every major has different numbers of people. Instead, I should calculate the employed rate.

However, since the employed rate is for each major, but I am using major cartography as my dimension, I realized that it would still be wrong if I compare the sum of the employed rate. Therefore, I changed it to average employed rate.

From the visualization above, we can tell that the people graduated from computers & mathematics have the highest average employed rate, which is 80.17%. People in business school also have relatively high average employed rate, which is 78.61%.

2. What is the most popular major among recent female graduates?

First, I am curious if business is still the most popular major category among recent female graduates:

This visualization proves my thought. Then what is the most popular major among them?

This visualization has too many dimensions, which is hard for people to see. Therefore, I limited the minimum number of recent female graduates to 12,000.

We can see that psychology is the most popular major among recent female graduates. Is it because psychology has the high income?

There are too many values on the 0k x-axis, which make me realize that I need to change the x-axis to logarithmic.

Psychology has a relatively low median earning among all the majors. In contrast, the major of petroleum engineering has the highest median earning, but it only has 282 female grads.

3. Do male and female students have the same proficiency in choosing stem majors?

First, I would like to know what the most popular stem major category for female students is:

Health is the most popular stem major category for female students, which contains 387,713 women. Is it same for male students?

The most popular stem major category for male is engineering, which is different comepare to female students.

4. What is the relationship between the ratio of female students and incomes?

By drawing the visualization above, we can see that the ratio of female students and the median earning are inversely proportional. For example, the major of communication disorders sciences and services has the highest rate of share of female graduate, which is 0.968, but its median earning is relatively low; whereas the major of petroleum engineering has the highest median earning, which is 110,000, but it only contains 12.06% female students.

In contrast, male students have the proportional relationship between their ratio and the median earning, which can be assumed that most male students choose their major based on how high the salary is after graduation. However, female students are still majoring in relatively low-income fields.