At this point, I had switched the template and customized the colors of the markers, grid lines, and outlines to make the color palette more visually appealing. However, I felt that it didn't accentuate my point that CMU's debt at graduation was lower than student debt at other universities, so I switched to a bar chart and adjusted the y-axis to make CMU's debt appear to be the smallest. If you autoscale the final product at the top, you can see the original bar chart. 
For the bubble chart depicted financial aid, I knew that I wanted to do a bubble chart since I had picked data points that would make CMU's statistic "float" to the top (I started documenting universities that had financial aid much lower than CMU's). I then scaled the circles by size to further emphasize my point and changed the y-axis to make the other universities "sink" to the bottom. 
For both charts, I kept having the issue where the labels would interfere with the axis titles. I was able to fix it on the website by changing the margins, but the embedded code seems to ignore these adjustments, making the embedded version rather ugly.