Dashboard Week Day 4: 3 Hour Dashboard

by Clare Fox

Today I was teaching in the morning so this whipped out most of day 4 of dashboard week.  This was both a blessing and a curse – I enjoyed the time away from my screen however the three hours I had left was not enough time to do everything I would have wanted.

The challenge

Today’s data was fairly easy to download and use – unlike the rest of the days this week. Today we were looking at students at universities in California from 1893 – 1945.  The real challenge today was working with an OLD version of Tableau – Tableau 8.3.4 to be exact – this had a few quirks and not all the features we were used to working with.

The preparation

The data didn’t take much preparation as you can see from my workflow above.  The only steps I took were:

  1. Creating a look up table of subjects so I could replace the abbreviations in the original dataset ( I didn’t even use these in my analysis in the end)
  2. Parsing the date field from a string to a date

 Working in Tableau 8 and visualising

As I really didn’t have that much time today, I needed to keep my analysis very simple.  After a few simple experiments with gender breakdown and course type, I  chose to compare the number registrations at University of California campuses with that of the private universities in the data set.

Although working in Tableau 8 was ok overall, there were a few things that frustrated me like not being able to pick a screen colour!

My final visualisation looked like this:

Insights

Key takeaways from my analysis today were:

  1. UC became a dominant academic institution for higher education in CA in the first half of the 20th century (NB I don’t think this dataset included all the other universities in California at that time)
  2. UC student population continued grow and grow most years up until WWII in 1893, however the population of the private universities seemed to stay at a similar level across the time frame.
  3. World War II really effected the student population of UC however it did not have such a big impact on the private universities.