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Graduation Rate and Federal Spending [Chart Reviews]

Below, we have two donut charts representing the change in federal spending on education and training from 1998 to 2008 (estimated).  What’s interesting is these donuts increase/decrease by segment, and also change in total size because total spending increased from $64B to $93B over the ten years.Education and training funds hit $93 billion in fiscal year 2008.

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What I find difficult is to be able to quantify the amount and percent that each segment changed from 1998 to 2008.  Another option to visualize this data is in a chart like the one shown here by Jon.  In the table below, I simply took the data from the pie charts and created a table.  The main difference is that I listed what percentage each segment is of the total for that year, as well as, the percent change from 1998 to 2008.  I found myself looking at the donut charts and immediately doing the math in my head to see how much each segment changed as compared to the total change.  Otherwise, how would you know that the black segment grew at a much greater rate than the whole (70% versus 45%)?  My question to you is, what would you prefer, the table or dual donuts?

BW Education Spending Table

The chart below is actually pretty well designed and shows two values per segment.  The small numbers to the left of the chart show the total high school graduation rate.  The bars show the percentage of children in each state that are considered living in poverty.  The print version of this graph is presented much better because this one only shows the graduation rate for the first column, whereas the print version shows it all.  The beauty of this type of chart is that you can easily create it in Excel using in-cell charting.  The only change I would have made is to modify the sorting of the bars to descending when the graduation rate is the same.  Right now the sorting is alpha when the rate is the same, which doesn’t make much sense.

On average, students in poorer states are less likely to graduate from high school.

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What do you think, love it or hate it?

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 7:30 am and is filed under Chart Review, Tony, Visualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Graduation Rate and Federal Spending [Chart Reviews]”

  1. Jon Peltier Says:
    November 18th, 2008 at 11:11 am

    Tony -

    No comments yet? Well, I did some reanalysis of the charts and posted that in Better Charts of Graduation Rate and Federal Spending. I’d like to hear your impressions.

  2. Tony Says:
    November 18th, 2008 at 12:43 pm

    I left a few comments on your site regarding the extra work you did and my thoughts. Nice job Jon!