Interactive: Where Are Davis New Mexico Scholars From & Where Do They Go To College?
Pausing to understand the trajectories of scholars in aggregate is an important part of our reflection process here at the scholarship, and while we often have data at our disposal, we have rarely taken the step of putting it into a form where we– and others– can come to a dynamic understanding about emerging and existing patterns. In that spirit of inquiry, we have created a data visualization tool that allows us to explore where in New Mexico our scholars are from, where they are going to college, and how that distribution has changed over time.
Among my early takeaways from the data is the growing impact of open enrollment on where our scholars are coming from. Here in Santa Fe, the pandemic accelerated what was already a growing trend within the district: open enrollment. Additionally, Albuquerque Public Schools also has relatively lenient open enrollment policies. Add to this the fact that the districts of Pojoaque and Española often overlap, with students effectively choosing which of these high schools to attend. In part because of these policies, the high school that students attend is not an accurate indicator of where students are from.
For example, in the screenshot below, we can see scholars all-time from the Española Valley– an awesome group of students! Although the permanent addresses of these scholars overlap, they are actually from five different high schools.
Davis New Mexico Scholars all-time from the Española Valley
I also had questions about the geographic spread of some of our affiliated high schools. Navajo Preparatory School and New Mexico School for the Arts are residential schools that deliberately recruit students from wide geographic areas, but other high schools such as Española Valley High School and Santa Fe High School also draw from wide geographic areas. One surprising result from the data: The MASTERS Program, an “early college” high school operating from within Santa Fe Community College, also has a large geographic reach. Note: To see the geographic reach of high schools, check the box next to the name of that school, and only scholars from that school will be highlighted.
For example, in the screenshot below, you can see where scholars who have attended Santa Fe High actually live:
Davis New Mexico Scholars all-time from Santa Fe High School
While most of these students live in Santa Fe, as you would expect, we also see students who have permanent addresses in the Española Valley, and even in Pecos/Glorieta, some distance away from Santa Fe itself.
Taken together, these analyses show the limitation of our previous methods, which had disaggregated students solely by the high schools they attend (which you can also do in the visualization below). By using a more sophisticated approach to geographic data, we are better able to understand where our scholars are coming from and have a sense of the communities where the scholarship is having a deep and consistent impact.
I highly encourage you to play around with the graphic below, and please feel free to contact me with any questions or conclusions you may have. A few notes:
This includes scholar data from 2014-2022, it does not include the recently-offered Class of 2023. I’ll be sure to update this at the end of this year.
This is not “case management” level data– if you see (or don’t see) a particular student here, it does not mean that they are or are not a scholar. We had to do some data cleaning to make the visualization work.
We used the permanent addresses scholars provided to create this dataset. We then centered the permanent addresses within each census block group to preserve student anonymity. To be clear, you can’t actually find a student’s home from this data.
You can use the toggles on the graphic to disaggregate students by college, high school, and cohort year. You can also scroll and zoom throughout the map to see the approximate location of students’ permanent addresses.
Lastly, a few acknowledgements:
Many thanks to Elissa at Topographia Designs for all of her help and expertise. She put this all together for us and helped me think through what would be most useful for us here at the scholarship.
I’ve clearly been inspired by Jon Boeckenstedt and his blog Higher Ed Data Stories. You can learn more about John in his interview for the Admissions Leadership Podcast.
I’m looking forward to sharing more visualizations like this one in the future. Check back to the blog often!
