Introduction
These visualizations using QGIS examine the trends of education costs and its correlations with poverty and murder/crime rates in the United States. After living in the U.S. for the past few years, I’ve grown increasingly aware of the drastic differences in cost of living and socioeconomic situations of different states. I wanted to observe whether crime and societal problems are influenced by education levels, especially since higher education is becoming increasingly unaffordable despite efforts to promote public education.
Methods
The datasets were sourced from Kaggle, and the U.S. map spacefile was sourced from the Census Bureau. Initial cleaning using OpenRefine was performed on all three CSV datasets from Kaggle in order join these on State names. Null rows and columns were removed, as well as extraneous information. Only State name and the three variables desired were kept: cost of education, murder rate per 100,000 capita, and percentage of population in poverty. Murder rates were extracted from a dataset with overall crime rates in the U.S., which had similar trends with respect to other types of crime (i.e. assault, robbery).
Using QGIS, three separate maps were created to visualize each variable. The map was created with the provided U.S. shapefile used as a vector layer. The joined CSV with all three variables was then joined again with the shapefile with “Add vector join” on State name. To better distinguish the conditions in each state, I used a continuous choropleth map with high-contrast color extremes. Legends were added to the visualization, where darker colors indicate higher prevalences.
Interpretation and Analysis
The map above shows the average cost of tuition for one undergraduate semester in 2022, including both private and public institutions in each state. We observe that the states with the highest education cost (in red) are concentrated along the west coast and northeast, whereas the states with the cheapest education cost are generally towards the center and south. Accordingly, the states with the top 5 largest populations (CA and NY) have the highest cost of undergraduate tuition, at 15,614 and 15,815 USD per term on average.
The highest murder rates are generally found in the southeastern states, and the states with the lowest murder rates are generally concentrated towards the northwest. In comparison with the previous map, the states with the most affordable education across the southeast also show a higher prevalence of murder compared to other states. Moreover, despite the high costs of education in CA and NY, murder rates for these states (9 and 11.1) are slightly above the average rate of 8.3. There seems to be a weak pattern between low education costs and high murder rates.
A higher prevalence of poverty is concentrated towards the south, especially in MS and LA, while the lowest prevalences of poverty are present in the northern states. Generally, the most affordable undergraduate education can also be found towards southern and central states. The prevalence of poverty seems to have a stronger correlation with education costs rather than the correlation between poverty and murder rates, and even murder rates and education costs. States that had among the highest murder rates per capita, such as GA and FL, actually present lower prevalences of poverty at 14.2 and 13.2 percent.
Conclusions
Overall, the variables visualized in the maps seemed to have weak correlations with each other, where the strongest trend indicated that education costs tend to be lower in states with more poverty. Additional data could have been collected on stronger factors leading to crime such as gun ownership, drug use, and unemployment rate. As QGIS was also an unfamiliar software, it would be a potential future opportunity to combine all the visualizations into a single map with multiple variables, thus more clearly visualizing the differences in each variable.
Sources
https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/time-series/geo/carto-boundary-file.html
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/marshuu/poverty-estimates
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/mathchi/violent-crime-rates-by-us-state