In this project, I asked the question: which states had the highest percentage of students studying primarily or fully in-person? One might speculate that colleges in severely Covid-effected might close its doors to students. Another might argue the opposite—namely, the Covid case numbers in each state represent its people attitude towards Covid. Thus, even with skyrocketing cases, school administrators and politicians (for public universities) may still open classrooms to their students. Beyond pure speculation, let us look at the data.
To display the data, I made a heat map. For my data, I calculated the percent of colleges, within a given state, which taught primarily in-person for small class sizes.
There are a few things of note in this graphic: many states which handled covid relatively well had colleges which opted against teaching person. This is true, especially for schools in New England. States like Vermont and Maine. In contrast, the opposite was true in many states which handled Covid poorly. South Carolina and Arizona had high case numbers, and yet it seems as though they opened many of their classrooms for small classes. Colleges in Oklahoma led the pack: 70% of their colleges opened their doors to small, in-person classes. Concerning my own personal observations: I would like to back this assertion with more data, but, from a cursory glance, it seems as though administrators and politicians classes based on their political affiliation. That is, colleges in Democratic states generally closed their doors to in-person classes. Colleges in Republican states generally opened their doors to small classes. There are a few exceptions. Colleges Ohio, Nevada, and Pennsylvania generally closed their doors to students, and yet none of these states lean strongly Democratic.
Data Analyst: Jordan Eisenman
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