Process

Before I decided on depicted college debt and financial aid, I did extensive research on available online data sets. However, none of the options that I was considering (how friendly are dolphins compared to jazz musicians?) came in an easily manipulable format until I came across Kiplinger's Best College Values ranking which, incidentally, ranked CMU. The table had various columns of information, but I decided that only the student debt and financial aid would be relevant and necessary to make my point. I created two Google Spreadsheets and cherry-picked which universities I wanted to use (for debt, these were the universities that had higher debts at graduation; for financial aid, universities that met less financial aid). I then looked for a data visualization website, which was more difficult than I thought it would be because most weren't free, required code, or needed to be externally downloaded. I finally found Plotly, which was relatively simple and fairly customizable.
Initially, when I plotted debt, I used the bubble chart below: