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Data Notes

I wanted to create a visualization that showed how educational attainment compared between rural and urban areas. To gather the data for this visualization, I utilized the Census Bureau’s API to create a custom table for myself. I decided to use the ACS 5 Year Estimates for 2011-2015 so I could get data on all counties since rural counties usually have small populations. I used the html address below to pull the data. You can find more out about the Census API at their website. You will need a free API Key to pull data from their site.

http://api.census.gov/data/2015/acs5/profile?get=NAME,DP02_0058E,DP02_0059E,DP02_0060E,DP02_0061E,DP02_0062E,DP02_0063E,DP02_0064E,DP02_0065E&for=county:*&key=…

I then needed to come up with a measure of what is a urban and rural county. I decided to use a crosswalk the NBER has for putting counties into the metro areas that they are assigned. The documentation for this table states that blank entries for metro areas can be considered to be rural so that is what I used for my measure. If you would like to see the crosswalk you can find it here.

Once I had the data in a usable form, I used Tableau to create the visualization. If you would like to alter or adjust the visualization, you can download the workbook using the toolbar above.

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