College Majors Analysis

This repository presents several analyses of college outcomes by major. The original data that inspired the project comes from a FiveThirtyEight article and the associated Github repo.

The processed data used for this analysis can be found in data/pums/processed/ and the majors list is in data/fivethirtyeight/majors-list.csv. The narrative analysis of this data is in main.ipynb.

Data Reporducibility

To redownload and process the original PUMS data for 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018:

make env  # sets up environment
make raw_pums_data
make all_grad_data

Once this data has been saved, to run the python scripts that extract gender, grad degree, and income data use the make targets

make major_stats # computes wage and gender stats for recent grads by major
make grad_stats # computes wage and gender stats split by graduate degree or not 

To download and process origina PUMS data for 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018:

This process will save a csv per year of the form 20XX_recent_grad_stats_by_major.csv to data/pums/processed with summary statistics for each year grouped by major.

To access the intermediate raw data for each year (only a subset of features collected) you can load the file XX_edu_wage_data.csv from data/pums/processed where XX corrsponds to the last two digits of the year.

Troubleshooting

For environment set up and data:

1. If you encounter ModuleNotFoundError, try to run conda activate hw7env
2. If you encounter CommandNotFoundError: Your shell has not been properly configured to use 'conda activate'., try to run conda init --all. Then close your terminal without shutting it down. Reopen it, and run the make command again.