After having attended and worked at a number of universities across the country, it’s interesting to me how different a university’s student culture can be. I’m interested in exploring what factors contribute to crime at colleges and universities in the United States, and if there is any correlation between the geographic location of a university and the types of crimes being committed.

The data set that I chose is completely ginormous and has about 10,000 college campuses listed. I plan to include only 4-year colleges and universities .  The information is broken down into many different categories, like murder, burglary, arson, robbery, etc., and I’d like to highlight each of these different categories for each university using a stacked bar chart and different colors to identify each category. Clearly, because each college has very different class sizes, I will need to calculate the percentage of each category.

I think it would be particularly interesting to highlight the different sorts of crimes that are most common and where (perhaps by state? or by colleges in rural areas vs. larger cities centers? or maybe even by rank?)

I plan to use Excel to format the data, Processing to create the initial graph, and then Illustrator to tidy everything up.

Data set: US Colleges and Universities Crime Statistics 2010-2012.