Straight from the CMU Brochure
Made by ashleyle
Made by ashleyle
"Straight from the CMU Brochure" aims to present data on CMU tuition and financial aid in a way that soothes our poor (literally) souls.
Created: November 2nd, 2015
My own charts also skew and omit data, although somewhat (dare I say) more subtly than FOX News does. They are also highly reminiscent of my own memories of college admission brochures when I was applying for college, as no matter which college I went to, none of the brochures portrayed any negative characteristics or weaknesses. I'm sure that times haven't changed since then, so current college admission tactics are probably still fairly relevant. These distortion tactics also extend to any field which requires one to sell oneself, a product, or a service, including resumes, advertisements, etc.
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.
The charts were created by Plotly, website here:
https://plot.ly/feed/
The data set is provided here:
http://www.kiplinger.com/tool/college/T014-S001-kiplinger-s-best-values-in-private-colleges/
The spreadsheets I created to import to Plotly were created by Google Spreadsheets, and the pictures of FOX News were found here:
http://www.businessinsider.com/fox-news-charts-tricks-data-2012-11
http://crooksandliars.com/2014/07/fox-news-phony-obama-approval-rating-chart
"Straight from the CMU Brochure" aims to present data on CMU tuition and financial aid in a way that soothes our poor (literally) souls.