I was about to jump into my regularly scheduled workday when I came across this data visualization tool for educational statistics, whose primary sources are EXACTLY the same ones that I’d been exploring yesterday. How weird is that. And that they had data about “Geographic Information Science & Cartography” at the 6-digit level (much more specific), much more interesting than what they consider its default “comparison” group, “social sciences” at the 2-digit level.
The measurements of “skills” for GIS&T showed a tremendous revealed comparative advantage (RCA) for negotiation, critical thinking, coordination, plus many management of (time/material resources/financial resources) ones. Complex problem solving is the only one that’s also high from another group of skills. RCA is “how much greater or lesser that skill’s rating is than the average,” which I guess means the average rating for that skill for other employment areas (?). It’s not a surprise that these are high, but it it is interesting that programming and technology design have such a little RCA for us.
Data from O’NET, Department of Labor.
And then there are the tree diagrams of the number of degrees awarded themselves. What’s not very helpful are how they’ve lumped things together into the shaded groups. There is much diversity within each group when you scan across the yellowish ones and the hospital-scrubs-green ones. Like in 2013 when both Texas State University and University of Maine at Machias (hi Tora) are both in the yellow set. Orange-shaded ones seem to consistently be the community college set.
For the year 2013: 
and for the year 2016:
Much to explore further here and how lovely that we can download the data themselves. Thank you, open government.
