UWF students' work will make data come alive
- October 29, 2014
- / Rick Harper
- / early-learning
Professor Raid Amin and his students are doing fascinating work at the University of West Florida.
His team is using sophisticated statistical analysis, combined with the latest geographic mapping tools, to present data in a very compelling way. The fact that he brings the 11 students in the class together to talk together and solve problems demonstrates our growing ability to harness technology to make education work better.
[sidebar]
The Pensacola News Journal highlighted the work of Professor Raid Amin and his students in a recent story.
There are strong income, quality of life, and cost of living differences that apply to different regions. Migration patterns in the U.S. are the result of people searching for economic opportunity and for quality of life. Looking at the data in more detail, one can see that geographic mobility applies even within communities.
Metropolitan statistical areas are the way that the federal data reflect these decisions on a local level. In order for counties to be classified as part of the same MSA, there must be an urban core of at least 50,000 people, and at least 25 percent of workers who live in adjacent counties must commute across county lines to get to work.
For the Pensacola-Ferry Pass-Brent MSA, as our community is known in federal statistical circles, Escambia and Santa Rosa meet those urban core and commuting criteria.
In 2011, federal statistical estimates are that some 41.3 percent of the almost 54,692 working Santa Rosans worked in Escambia, versus 31.5 percent who worked in Santa Rosa. Many of those Santa Rosans commuted to high wage jobs in the urban core. Another 13.5 percent of working Santa Rosans go to Okaloosa County, where many work at the high-wage jobs at Eglin Air Force Base and Hurlburt Field.
It is clear that Escambia and Santa Rosa are joined at the hip – one cannot be healthy if the other is not. We are one community that lives in two counties.
Pensacola is a city with a long and rich history. Its urban core continues to be the center of economic life and of high wage jobs. While some larger city centers around the nation are experiencing population growth, most MSA growth nationally occurs in the suburbs. This is true of Pensacola, where much of the new growth has occurred in Santa Rosa.
One of the legacies of a centuries-old city is the presence of a stock of housing where people of lower incomes can afford to live. That exists in Escambia. Across the U.S. we are more likely to live in neighborhoods populated by households of similar economic attainment to our own.
This has profound implications for everything from local schools to local tax revenue to local crime rates.
What we need to focus on is how to make sure that every part of our community thrives. Neither Escambia nor Santa Rosa is more important in this equation. We are parts of the same whole.
Professor Amin and his students are doing a couple of really good things. Their work empowers citizens to have data-driven discussions about the communities in which they live. Importantly, their class is a first-hand example of an important part of the future of education.
That future is one is which excellent technology tools allow people with similar interests to combine their skills and efforts to learn and grow together, regardless of where they live.
"The 11 mostly distance-learning students have spent their fall semester working as data detectives — mining databases for information on every county in the contiguous U.S. — all 3,108 — for statistics to create a quality of life index based on the educational, financial, safety and health profile of each county."Read the PNJ story here. [/sidebar] There are a little more than 3,000, or county-like (parishes in Louisiana, boroughs in Alaska, or independent cities like St. Louis) jurisdictions in the United States. Florida has 67. But the usefulness of crunching big datasets depends critically on the quality of the data being crunched. One of the great strengths of federal statistical agencies such as the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and others, is the quality of the data that are publicly available that describe these counties. The Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics links these agencies and scholars in the various academic disciplines to help ensure quality and minimize errors. The picture that the data from Professor Amin’s class paint is familiar. The South has a generations-old legacy of rural agricultural lands, racial inequality, lower educational attainment, and associated lower incomes. These data are all connecting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that shows a consistent picture. Lower educational attainment is associated with lower incomes, worse health outcomes and worse community amenities. It is no accident that poor environmental measures are in lower income communities. The better outcomes that show up in the map along parts of the Gulf coastline, including those for our community, give truth to that old saying “the further South you go, the further North you get.” The chart below shows educational attainment and personal income per person for the 67 Florida counties for the most recent single year of data. There are clearly factors other than education that influence how much we earn, but the data overwhelmingly document the link between education attainment and annual income. The Florida counties that perform most poorly in terms of income are those with low educational attainment, and they are overwhelmingly rural and sparsely populated. Some, such as Calhoun, are in Northwest Florida, while others are in our sugar-growing agricultural South. The relationship holds true when we look at the same data for the 3,080 counties for which we have both income and education data.
There are strong income, quality of life, and cost of living differences that apply to different regions. Migration patterns in the U.S. are the result of people searching for economic opportunity and for quality of life. Looking at the data in more detail, one can see that geographic mobility applies even within communities.
Metropolitan statistical areas are the way that the federal data reflect these decisions on a local level. In order for counties to be classified as part of the same MSA, there must be an urban core of at least 50,000 people, and at least 25 percent of workers who live in adjacent counties must commute across county lines to get to work.
For the Pensacola-Ferry Pass-Brent MSA, as our community is known in federal statistical circles, Escambia and Santa Rosa meet those urban core and commuting criteria.
In 2011, federal statistical estimates are that some 41.3 percent of the almost 54,692 working Santa Rosans worked in Escambia, versus 31.5 percent who worked in Santa Rosa. Many of those Santa Rosans commuted to high wage jobs in the urban core. Another 13.5 percent of working Santa Rosans go to Okaloosa County, where many work at the high-wage jobs at Eglin Air Force Base and Hurlburt Field.
It is clear that Escambia and Santa Rosa are joined at the hip – one cannot be healthy if the other is not. We are one community that lives in two counties.
Pensacola is a city with a long and rich history. Its urban core continues to be the center of economic life and of high wage jobs. While some larger city centers around the nation are experiencing population growth, most MSA growth nationally occurs in the suburbs. This is true of Pensacola, where much of the new growth has occurred in Santa Rosa.
One of the legacies of a centuries-old city is the presence of a stock of housing where people of lower incomes can afford to live. That exists in Escambia. Across the U.S. we are more likely to live in neighborhoods populated by households of similar economic attainment to our own.
This has profound implications for everything from local schools to local tax revenue to local crime rates.
What we need to focus on is how to make sure that every part of our community thrives. Neither Escambia nor Santa Rosa is more important in this equation. We are parts of the same whole.
Professor Amin and his students are doing a couple of really good things. Their work empowers citizens to have data-driven discussions about the communities in which they live. Importantly, their class is a first-hand example of an important part of the future of education.
That future is one is which excellent technology tools allow people with similar interests to combine their skills and efforts to learn and grow together, regardless of where they live.
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