This is an intentionally open-ended Data Challenge, where you’ll be demonstrating your ability to digest different datasets and produce a story out of them.

Your editor at the Daily Hampshire Gazette has asked you to write a story on the topic of student loans and college affordability. You can take the story in any direction you like, provided it ties back to that topic.

The requirements for this Challenge are threefold:

  1. The story should be between 600 and 1,200 words in length.

  2. It must involve at least some original data analysis (in R) of at least two of the datasets listed below.

  3. It must include quotes from at least two of the transcripts below, as well as one source you interviewed yourself. (This may be a student, a researcher, a politician, or anyone else. However, you must have completed the interview.)

You can download an abridged copy of this notebook (to make getting started easier) by clicking here.

 

Datasets

Please analyze at least two of the following datasets. However, you may supplement your analysis with statistics from any other source (e.g., a report by The New York Fed or academic research).

 

 

 

 

Transcripts

Below are quotes from fictional people created for the purposes of this assignment. Please find a way to incorporate at least one quote from at least two different sources. (This requires you to sift through all the remarks below and identify what’s most useful given your story angle. A quote can be just a small part of a sub-bullet; you don’t need the whole segment.)

 

Anamaria Purcell, Associate Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst
  • “My research has explored the rising costs of college education, especially for middle-class families. I’ve published 2 books on that topic and have presented at dozens of conferences. It’s a really fascinating research area because it’s something that affects all of us. It doesn’t matter if we have student loans ourselves, this is an issue that’s affecting the entire economy!”
  • “We’ve seen the cost of education increase so rapidly in this country. Part of that is just your typical inflationary costs. The salaries of professors need to be adjusted to reflect new costs of living, buildings need to be maintained and those costs go up with inflation, and the costs of materials are also going to go up like everything else. But a lot of it also involves declining support from the state. Even as the costs of running a university have gone up, states have appropriated less money to those universities. That gap has to be made up somehow. It seems like at a lot of places, it’s been the students and their families filling the gap with higher tuition prices.”
  • “The thing is, if someone has a lot of student debt, that means they’re probably not taking as many risks starting their own business. That’s a big problem because small businesses have been a big part of the economic engine in this country. If you see less of those, that’s a lot of creativity being lost, and less competition in those communities. That leads to economic inefficiencies, and we all lose.”
  • “Also, people with a lot of debt are not going to have much disposable income. All those jokes about Millenials killing everything because they’re not spending money – well, it’s because that money’s going to paying off student loans. You can’t blame them for killing Applebee’s or TGI Fridays restaurants by not eating out if they need to cook their own meals to save money, or go to low-end restaurants like McDonald’s when they’re out. That’s the other thing. When they’re out, they sometimes end up eating junk food because it’s cheap. When they go to the supermarket, they buy cheap, processed foods with low nutritional value. In a few years, all that is going to come back to bite them due to worsening health. And it comes back to bite us all with even higher healthcare costs.”

 

Thomas Georgescu, Founder of College Power Up!, a Northampton, MA-based nonprofit that hosts free college advising sessions around the country
  • “I tell a lot of students that if they want to get a good college education for relatively cheap, their best bet is to pick a good community college and then transfer to a four-year public university after their second year. Students do miss out on a lot with that, of course. It’s less time to make friends and connections, and they sometimes end up missing out on really great college opportunities like working their way up to management at a student newspaper or getting to a high-level student government position. But it can save them a lot of money.”
  • “If a student isn’t sure what they want to do in college, I tell them to take the community college route. It’s just a much lower cost for them to bear while they figure out what they want to do. If they decide to change their focus, they don’t have to worry about having spent several thousand dollars on credits that aren’t as useful anymore.”
  • “Sometimes, students realize that the major they spent three years working on isn’t right for them anymore. But, then, they look at their loan statement and they realize they’re already twenty thousand dollars in debt. At that point, the student is just going to think, I’m just going to stick this out. I’ll stick with this major that I don’t want just so I can get a degree and start working to pay this stuff off. That’s a really terrible thing to have happen, and it happens all the time.”
  • “You’re asking a 17 or 18-year-old to make a decision involving tens of thousands of dollars, and that will sometimes follow them for the rest of their lives. That’s crazy to me. A lot of them have never learned how to create a budget or sometimes even had a credit card. They look at the sticker price and they don’t have a really good point of reference. I’ll often hear from students, it sounds like a lot, but everyone else is doing it, too. It can’t be that bad, and I’ll just get a great job right after college and pay it off in a few years. But at that point, they don’t realize what the job market is like, or, if they get a good job, how much money gets taken out of their paycheck by taxes and all these other obligations they have, like paying rent, going to the doctor, and so on. They’ve just never had to deal with that stuff before they get this loan contract tying them down to a huge debt.”

 

Elisabeth Murray, Research Fellow at the New England Center for Educational Policy, a Boston-based nonpartisan think tank
  • “A lot of people just don’t realize how hard it can be to discharge a student loan. If you find yourself underwater because you paid too much for your home, you can usually start bankrupcy proceedings and walk away from the mortgage. You’ll lose the home and your credit rating will be impacted for a few years but you can at least start over. With a student loan, you have very few options to discharge the debt. Even if you walk away from everything else, you might still be liable to pay those loans for years to come, with no way out.”
  • “The high cost of attendance is turning college into a business, both for administrators and students. Things have become more transactional. Schools start to devote resources to the majors that have the highest rates of employment, and measure the success of their departments based on how many of their students graduate quickly and get jobs. In many ways, the college experience becomes less about learning and more about training. That transfers to students, too. Parents will pressure them more to justify their choice of major based on the jobs that are out there. And students feel more pressure to go into an area with a lot of jobs instead of something they’re passionate about.”
  • “Coming out of college tens of thousands of dollars in debt will certainly impact the choices a person will make afterward. Unlike their parents, those graduates are far less likely to go on to buy a house. They just can’t afford the”starter home" that would allow them to build up equity and eventually move into a nicer, long-term house. Instead, many get caught in the renter’s cycle, devoting large percentages of their income to rental properties and never being able to own a place of their own. That’s a problem for communities because you just end up having absent landlords who don’t invest as much in the community and transient renters who never develop roots."
  • “We believe lawmakers need to do more to fund higher education. The situation is getting to a breaking point after years of declining federal and state support around the country. Even here in Massachusetts, where we consider public education to be crucial to the Commonwealth’s success, we can do much better.”

 

Erik Castellanos, State House Representative for Massachusetts’ 5th Worcester District (Republican)
  • “Massachusetts has the country’s finest higher education system. We did this without nonsense like the CHERISH Act, which is yet another tax on the very people who are struggling to make ends meet. Instead of even more taxes, we need to focus on giving more choices.”
  • “We can’t keep senselessly giving these universities more money. All that leads to is more waste and excess. We already have professors making hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a different dean for everything. Do we really need to have espresso machines on every floor of a dorm?”
  • “I don’t support the government subsidizing even more student loans. The reason we have a problem is because schools know that the government will pay for all these loans. If the student defaults, the school still gets its money. So where’s the incentive for them to do a better job? We need to cut the cord so schools have more skin in the game. That’s the best way to make college more affordable.”
  • “If we’re going to subsidize these schools or guarantee loans for the students they prey on, then we sure better make sure we tie the subsidies to a school’s performance. If the Commonwealth’s graduates aren’t getting jobs, the school shouldn’t get the money.”

 

Daffodyl Samuels, State House Representative for Massachusetts’ 3rd Hampshire District (Democrat)
  • “I fully support the CHERISH Act because I want to help raise more than $500 million for public higher education. I want to be part of the solution, and we need more legislators who are willing to step up and invest in the future. We can’t afford to wait any longer.”
  • “It’s crucial that we increase funding for our state’s higher education system. Every year we have more students dropping out because they just can’t afford the cost of going to college. They end up burdened with tens of thousands of dollars in debt, whether or not they receive a degree. We need to help those students.”
  • “I have spent 10 years trying to get students more support but I haven’t found the same enthusiasm in the Executive branch. For some people, tax cuts are more important than a well-educated Commonwealth. This year, we change things.”

 

 

Part 1

In this part of the Challenge, please include both (a) the code and (b) an explanation of the code for all of the assertions made in your story that are based on your original analysis. (This includes any statistics you calculated or claims you’re making based on the data.)

I’ll begin by loading the datasets that have been provided for the analysis:

# Load data
library(tidyverse)
shef_appropriations <- read_csv("http://projects.rodrigozamith.com/datastorytelling/data/Public_FTE_Enrollment_and_Educational_Appropriations_per_FTE_FY_1992_to_2017.csv")
nyfed_student_debt_balance <- read_csv("http://projects.rodrigozamith.com/datastorytelling/data/Student_Loan_Debt_Balance_per_Capita_by_State.csv")
nyfed_student_debt_balance_delinquent <- read_csv("http://projects.rodrigozamith.com/datastorytelling/data/Percent_of_Student_Loan_Debt_Balance_90plus_Days_Delinquent_by_State.csv")
nyfed_total_debt <- read_csv("http://projects.rodrigozamith.com/datastorytelling/data/Total_Debt_Balance_and_Its_Composition.csv")
nyfed_delinquent_debt_type <- read_csv("http://projects.rodrigozamith.com/datastorytelling/data/Percent_of_Balance_90plus_Days_Delinquent_by_Loan_Type.csv")
nyfed_total_debt_by_age <- read_csv("http://projects.rodrigozamith.com/datastorytelling/data/Total_Debt_by_Product_Type_and_Age.csv")
doe_collection_agencies <- read_csv("http://projects.rodrigozamith.com/datastorytelling/data/Default_Recoveries_by_Private_Collection_Agency_FY18Q4.csv")
college_scorecard_subset <- read_csv("http://projects.rodrigozamith.com/datastorytelling/data/College_Scorecard_Most_Recent_Cohorts_Scorecard_Elements.csv", na="NULL")

Then, I wanted to do … so I …. This helped me find out that …. Here’s the code for doing all this:

# Your code here

I also noticed that …, so I dug deeper into that by …. That’s why I said in the story that …. Here’s the code for that:

# Your code here

Part 2

Include your story below. After writing your story, reflect on each of the following: How strong is your lead? Is the information presented clearly and can be easily understood by a lay person? Are all assertions properly attributed in the story? Is the story well-organized and does it flow seamlessly? Does the story contain the requisite number of human and data sources? Does the story meet the length guidelines and is it free of spelling, grammatical, and factual errors?

Story here.