Where are Public College Hartford Promise Success Stories?

Findings

This visualization demonstrates the comparison between the students who earned, and did not earn a bachelor's degree at a public four year institution. This data is extremely important because it tells our community partners where their students are more versus less successful which could tell them which schools to emphasize to their students in the future. The table with a bar chart included not only allows us to demonstrate the raw numbers to see which school students earned Bachelors Degrees, but it allows us to make a comparison with that number to the number of students in total that attended that school from the program which gives us the ability to show percentages. This allows us to draw better conclusions about where Hartford Promise students are having more success because we can compare the success rate of students to the total number of students, the percentages, while also just knowing the raw number of students who earned bachelor's degrees.

This visualization showcases the different ethnicities of those who were in Hartford Promise and obtained degrees at public institutions. In order to make my data more accurate I divided the amount of students in Hartford Promise based on ethnicities that received degrees by the total number of participants in Hartford Promise based on their ethnicity. By normalizing the data, we were able to make the data more reliable. The number of participants in Hartford Promise that were asian were 6 while there were 45 participants that were hispanic, leaving a large disparity between the data. After normalizing the data, we figured out that white participants in Hartford Promise had the highest percentage of obtaining degrees at public institutions, with 6 participants obtaining seven degrees. This gave white students an 116% chance at obtaining a degree from a public institution. These numbers likely mean that one of the white students in Hartford Promise obtained 2 degrees at a public university, giving them a percentage larger than 100 percent. The second highest percent by ethnicity was hispanics with an 80 percent success rate at public universities. This number is significant considering the fact that there were more representatives of that ethnicity than any other in the data set with 45. Asian students in Hartford Promise had a 66 percent success rate while black students in Hartford Promise had a 53 percent success rate. This led us to conclude that of the ethnicities represented in Hartford Promise, black students that attended public colleges had the lowest success rate in terms of obtaining a degree. This is valuable information as it showcases to members of Hartford Promise which ethnicities may need more support and resources given to them in order to help them succeed. By offering more support to black students in Hartford Promise, their likelihood of obtaining degrees from public universities could increase.

For our third visualization, we focused on the universities that black students in Hartford Promise attended. We chose to focus on this specific ethnic group due to the fact that they had the lowest rate of obtaining a degree at public universities, so we wanted to track their academic journey. Our visualization consisted of a symbol map for every public university that a black student in Hartford Promise attended. The larger the circle on the map, the more students of color attended there. We also made it so once the viewer hovered over specific points on the map, there would be data such as the name of the university, total number of black students enrolled, total number of black students who obtained a degree as well as the degree rate. By including all this data viewers of our graph were given much more meaningful and accurate data. From the data we analyzed, we concluded that UCONN had the most black students from Hartford Promise with 16, with 13 of them obtaining degrees. This was good enough to give them an 81% degree rate. We found that the public university in this data set with the highest degree rate was Southern Connecticut State University with 200 percent. There was one participant that was black who attended this college and obtained two degrees, giving this institution a 200 percent degree rate according to our models. Both Manchester Community College and Eastern Connecticut University had zero percent degree rates, with Manchester Community having 6 participants and zero degrees and Eastern Connecticut University had two participants who did not obtain degrees. WIth this data we are showcasing to Hartford Promise that enrollment in public universities such as Southern Connecticut State University of University of Connecticut should be encouraged while enrollments in colleges such as Manchester Community College or Eastern Connecticut University should be discouraged due to their poor degree rate.