Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Montana: high school versus college. Fascinating to about three dozen people in the world, none of whom are reading this.

So mostly because I felt like doing lots of data entry after an invigorating bike ride, I decided to enter the names, high school rates and college rates of all of Montana's 56 counties into a spreadsheet, and see what I would come up with:
According to the Formula that Shall not Be Named,there is almost the exact same numerical correlation as in the diagram of Oregon counties. However, visually the diagrams are quite different. The Montana diagram looks like two separate charts. Up until about the 85% mark, there doesn't seem to be much correlation between high school and college. And then after 85, the line is pretty clear and pretty obvious.
A few things about Montana geography have to be explained here. Much of like in Oregon, the counties in the upper right have a good percentage of the population. the exceptions are Gallatin and Beaverhead, which both have colleges. This diagram gives me proof that Gallatin, which is a lot like Oregon's Benton County, actually is Montana's version of said.

So based on this, and the national and Oregon data, what do you think the correlations between the 2008 election and high school and college rates is?

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