This report analyzes the TidyTuesday 2018-10-16 release on College Major & Income — 173 rows after cleaning and merge. Which majors pay most — and which carry unemployment risk?
Five charts track Low wage jobs across time, category, and named entities — trend, leaders, distribution, tiers, and relationships. Where companion files exist in the repo, they are joined before analysis so reception, geography, or metadata columns are not left on the table.
FAST FACTS
DATASET CONTEXT
The source is the TidyTuesday release from 2018-10-16 (R for Data Science community). This working file contains 173 rows and 21 columns after merging all available CSV/XLSX tables in the week folder.
Charts are exported as Plotly JSON with PNG fallbacks. Medians are used for robustness where distributions skew. Index-style fields (row numbers, sequential IDs) are excluded from metric selection.
How to read this report: start with the chart caption, then ask what the metric actually means, what a non-expert should notice first, and what an expert would challenge in the source. The goal is not to memorize every number; it is to leave with a sharper question than the one you arrived with.
Reader path: if you are new to the topic, treat each chart as a guided tour of one question: who leads, how concentrated the field is, what changes over time, and where the outliers sit. If you already know the domain, use the same charts as a challenge: check whether the metric is the right proxy, whether the source omits an important population, and whether the headline survives the limitations section.
CHART 1 — BREAKDOWN
PSYCHOLOGY leads at 48,207; COMMERCIAL ART AND GRAPHIC DESIGN anchors the low end at 14,839.
Grouping by major exposes how the metric varies across the catalog's major entities.
CHART 2 — LEADERS
PSYCHOLOGY leads at 48,207 — 26,912 marks the median among the top dozen.
Head-of-field concentration is where quality, scale, or brand visibly separates from the pack.
CHART 3 — DISTRIBUTION
Category boxes reveal whether low wage jobs consensus is shared or contested across tiers.
Wide whiskers flag segments where outliers — not averages — drive reputation.
CHART 4 — GAP ANALYSIS
Humanities & Liberal Arts sits 2,235 above the median; Physical Sciences trails by 978.
Diverging from the median exposes which tiers over- or under-perform — not just who ranks first.
SUPPLEMENT — RELATIONSHIP
Joint plot of low wage jobs and unemployment rate surfaces clusters the averages erase.
Bubble size tracks repeat presence — outliers are archetypes, not noise.
LIMITATIONS
Community-cleaned TidyTuesday snapshots are not live APIs. Missing values, spelling variants, and week-of-export coverage limits apply. Merged tables may fan out or duplicate rows when join keys are imperfect.
Findings describe the file on hand — treat them as structural signals about College Major & Income, not exhaustive truth about the full domain.
CONCLUSION
Read as a teaching map, College Major & Income shows why one metric is rarely enough: leaders, tails, trends, and relationships each answer a different question about low wage jobs.
The best reading is modest: use the chart to sharpen the question, then check the source and limits before turning it into a claim.
REFERENCES
Data Science Learning Community. (2018). TidyTuesday: College Major & Income. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/main/data/2018/2018-10-16/recent-grads.csv
EDITOR'S NOTE
Artometrics data report from the TidyTuesday research pipeline. Charts and aggregates are reproducible from the embedded exhibits and public source files.