Once upon a time in America, students paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the millennial generation to take on crushing educational debt loads, and everyone lived unhappily ever after.
From January 2006 to July 2016, the Consumer Price Index for college tuition and fees increased 63 percent, compared with an increase of 21 percent for all items. Competition is one reason. As schools wanted to attract top-tier students, the costs of hiring brand-name faculty members, building expensive facilities, and offering comfortable student amenities all add up. All these factors combined produce headache-inducing tuition rates at both private and public universities.
The following visualization shows the average in state tuition and fees for one year full time study at a public four-year institution from 2005/06 to 2015/16 for different American states.
Best way to analyze data is through data visualizations. Data visualization turns numbers and letters into aesthetically pleasing visuals, making it easy to recognize patterns and find exceptions.
We understand and retain information better when we can visualize our data. With our decreasing attention span, and because we are constantly exposed to information, it is crucial that we convey our message in a quick and visual way. Patterns or insights may go unnoticed in a data spreadsheet. But if we put the same information on a chart, the insights become obvious.
So what’s good about this visualization?
- The dashboard incorporates a significant amount of data, making it easy to compare and convey the matrix in the context.
- The dashboard has a flow structure which effectively incorporates user to view data based on time scales such as year and identify the trend year after year.
What can be changed
- Too much data, too close together – this dashboard doesn’t have enough room to breathe, giving users data overload. It’s also poorly structured, making it extremely difficult to interpret what information the chart is displaying, especially at a glance.
- Confusing colors – The plain background is quite helpful as it makes the visualizations stand out, however the subtle variation in shade actually makes it more difficult to differentiate between the lines for each of the cities.
- Make visualizations clear and precise. It is not a good idea to include all the information in a single visualization which cannot be digested easily doesn’t solve our purpose. So, it’s better to enable drill downs to navigate to more detailed information from the main visualization.
How to fix it:
- Use of vibrant and distinct colors – colors such as green, blue, yellow, or red could be used to indicate different ranges of percentage increase.
- Add options to drill down – drill down option could be used to represent the point where the state reached the percentage value 75%,50% or 25%.
Dashboard could be broken down to multiple dashboards to include states region wise. This makes the data easier to read and digest.
References:
https://www.geckoboard.com/blog/5-terrible-dashboard-designs-and-how-to-fix-them/#.WQPdh4jyu00