Dataset of the Day: Collegiate Rowing Revenues
December 16th, 2008by William Benjamin
The U.S. Department of Education has a link on their website to The Equity in Athletics Data Analysis Cutting Tool, which allows visitors to download spreadsheets that show financial information about equity in college athletics. The universities that the data accounts for are US college universities that receive Title IV funding. What that basically means is that these colleges participate in federal student aid programs, which a majority of college universities do.
Considering that I was a rower in college, I was pleased to find this data. I was particularly interested in seeing what it would look like if I mapped out the college universities that have rowing programs and then by using proportion symbols, I could see which colleges had the biggest revenues. The following map displays revenues of collegiate rowing teams for both male and female programs combined in 2007:
(Click Finder! to view the data set)
Now to give you an idea of what each college rowing program revenue looks like by gender, the following map is broken down by female revenue and male revenue using proportion symbols to show the amount of revenue comparatively.
(Click map or Maker! to view map)
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December 16th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
[…] Dataset of the Day: Collegiate Rowing Revenues | Off the Map … The US Department of Education has a link on their website to The Equity in Athletics Data Analysis Cutting Tool, which allows visitors to download. … Website. Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. About Off the Map … […]
December 17th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
So, having been the Head Coach at Eastern Michigan University, I can tell you that the entire DEPARTMENT doesn’t have the revenue assigned to EMU rowing on your map . . . So how are you defining revenue? Because I don’t think there’s a single rowing program in the country that is “making money”
December 17th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
This is clearly a low level dataset!
December 17th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
I’m with the other guys. UT Austin has a University Funded women’s team (obviously to offset the men’s football team) and a club men’s teams. The women have all the bells and whistles: boats, boathouse, gear, travel budget etc. The men’s side some funding from “Rec Sports” but the majority comes from sponsors and member dues. So wtf is with that data set?
December 17th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Charley,
Revenue as defined in the Glossary on the US Department of Education, Office of Postsecondary Education website:
“All revenues attributable to intercollegiate athletic activities. This includes revenues from appearance guarantees and options, contributions from alumni and others, institutional royalties, signage and other sponsorships, sport camps, state or other government support, student activity fees, ticket and luxury box sales, and any other revenues attributable to intercollegiate athletic activities.”
Thanks for the comments.
December 17th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
You honestly want us to believe that U of Michigan women have <$5000? Moreover, I used to coach at Hamilton College and can assure you it is not located on the Canadian border.
December 17th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Hi Colin -
Thanks for the feedback. The data came from the US Dept. of Education - http://www.ope.ed.gov/athletics/Index.aspx - and was not created by us. So, it is the DOEd that would want you to believe the number not us.
The value on the DOEd site is $4,930 for Univ. of Michigan. Although it is important to keep in mind, as Bill pointed out, this is not “funding” but “revenue” generated by the team. In which case the number could be plausible although still seems quite low.
The debate though is health and exhibits exactly why it is great to map this data and blog about it. Often times official source data is wrong and this makes it easy for errors to be found. Thanks for finding the geocoding error - Bill is working on getting that fixed. The concept of the blog and software is to make data accessible and generating conversations going around it. Appreciate the feedback and thanks for digging into the data.
best,
sean
December 17th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
I’d like to point out that the symbols on the male/female breakout plot were chosen somewhat poorly. For example, check out the two Texas schools, which both appear to have “some” male revenue. The smallest symbol includes “0″ (zero) revenue, so the map makes it appear that there is some male revenue, when the data-set has none. In the case of UT-Austin, the male symbol obscures the female symbol, making it appear like all the revenue is male, when in fact, none of it is.
December 17th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
And I’m not sure how worried you are about the exactness of the latitude/longitude numbers, but, for example, check out the Boston schools. Harvard and MIT are directly on top of each other (because they’re both coded to Cambridge, maybe? But they are in different zipcodes, 02138 vs 02139) while BU is in East Boston, and NU is plotted as being directly downtown.
December 18th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Hi Brian,
One feature that is helpful is the ability to turn layers on and off. If you click the “eye” icon on the layer it will turn the layer off. That will allow you to look at each layer individually.
Also in the lower right hand corner there is a tab you can click to pop out a legend that will provide the data ranges. Dealing with zeroes is an age old cartographic problem. Zero is still a number you want to convey to the viewer, because it tells you something about the data. Actually web maps makes this tons better because now you can click on the map and get the actual number. Where as with a print map you would just know it was something in the range.
Geocoding is always challenging. If the geocoder cannot find a street address it goes the centroid of the zipcode which usually causes the issues you’ve seen. Universities often times have weird addresses since they are on campuses tha throw many geocoders.
Google allows you to move the marker in their local search results, which is a great fix. Hopefully some day we’ll have resource to enable that. Appreciate the feedback.
best,
sean