Graduation in the United States
Graduation is the first step into the real world. Whether it is high school graduation or college graduation most people generally want to have that diploma to show they have learned something at their institution that can translate to the real world. I wanted to look at the relationship between different states to see how they compare to each other in terms of academics. I wanted to look at a wide range of states to get an idea as to how different states value education. More specifically I wanted to see a relationship between different states, and the willingness they must pursue a higher form of education by taking the next steps towards a college degree.
The first part of my analysis is to look at the United States as a whole. I wanted to get a general sense as to how Americans value higher education. The data set that I used was the counties_df. The counties_df holds all the different counties in the United States, and from this I was able to find a correlation between high school and college graduation. From this data set I pulled both ‘Pct_HS_Grad’ and ‘Pct_College_Grad’. This data would help structure my scatter plot charts to get an understanding of the comparison that I was trying to make within the data set. After looking at the data there is a negative correlation of -0.78 which is a very strong negative correlation between high school graduation and college graduation. The chart shows most Americans do not continue their education past high school graduation. After viewing this I wanted to see if this was a common occurrence between individual states.
For the next part of my analysis, I wanted to look at different states across the country, and compare it to the entire country. The states that I choose were states that I associated with and states with higher and lower populations. The 5 states that I choose to look at were California, Colorado, Louisiana, New York, and Texas. I felt like these states would give me the best insight for trends in students graduating high school and college. The first two states I choose to look at were Texas and California because they have the highest population with California having 38 million and Texas having 30 million. After looking at the data they all had a similar negative correlation. California had a correlation of -0.86 and Texas had a correlation of -0.60. After looking at the charts for both Texas and California it was clear that Texas had a moderate negative correlation between high school graduates and college graduates while California had a stronger negative correlation. One thing I did notice looking at the two data charts is Texas had more data points compared to California. The points on the chart were more spread out for Californian counties, but also Texas had more data points than California. This is because Texas has far more counties that California. I can conclude from this data that Texas counties had more students graduating from both high school and college. From the other states that I compared they all had similar correlations to California. Colorado had almost the exact same correlation to California with a strong negative correlation of -0.86. One of the outliers from my analysis besides Texas was New York which had the strongest negative correlation of -0.92. This means New York had the most students who were graduating high school and not graduating college. As for the other states that I choose to look at they all had stronger correlations compared to the United States as a whole which all had correlations around -0.80.
Education is a very important. From the data it is interesting to see how most of the states have students graduating high school and not continuing to graduate from college. This might be because of the inability for some students to pay for colleges. It is reassuring to see that students are graduating from high school, so it shows they are capable of going to college. They might not have the opportunity to attend. Maybe this can change soon.
