An Interactive Map

The Chronicle of Higher Education published a fascinating interactive map about the educational accomplishments of state legislators across the nation. I present it here as an example of things you can do on the Internet that you can't do anyplace else. The page opens to a map of the US that shows the percentage of college graduates in each state. Move your cursor over a state to get the exact number or just enjoy the map as a graph. I was surprised to see that Massachusetts wasn't in the top 5 in college graduates, but Texas was. In fact, Massachusetts was only a little above the national average of 74%. Clicking on a state brings up a page with even more data. Graphs compare the state with the national averages for all state legislatures and all state residents. In Texas, for example, 48% of the legislature have a degree beyond a BA (or perhaps with politicians its a BS) while only 4% of the Texas population does. 71% of the state pols were educated in the Lone Star State. To the left of the graphs is a map of the state with blue dots. Click on the dot and it will tell you the name of the college and the number of legislators that went there (you may have to zoom the map for Boston). In Massachusetts only two legislators attended Stonehill and only three attended Bridgewater. Four went to Massasoit. The largest number of pols attended Suffolk which is just across the street from the State House. Although several Texas legislators were educated in Mexico only one Massachusetts legislator went to college outside the continental US at the University of Puerto Rico.

It might be more fun if the maps showed where the legislators had their bank accounts, but I suppose the Cayman Islands are hard to find even with Google Maps. Still you couldn't do this with a textbook where you are the prisoner of the author's point of view. Given my penchant for making fun of Sarah Palin you betcha I checked out the education of Alaskan legislators-70% went to college and 79% had attended schools outside the state compared to only 39% in Massachusetts. For what it's worth, that's "self-directed original research" which could only be done easily with internet media. The system isn't flawless. Google Maps locates Ellsworth College, which is apparently in Iowa, in the South Atlantic off Africa-although maybe it was some kind of foreign exchange.

The Internet has turned out so much better than what I thought it would be when I invented it back in 1972. Didn't mention that before? I was at my cousin's wedding in D. C. when I was introduced to a lovely young lady who was computer cataloging the Library of Congress collection. "Say", I said "Wouldn't it be a cool idea if you could actually put the books into a computer so everyone could access everything at any time?" OK, maybe we didn't invent the Internet, maybe we invented geekiness, but for the next hour we drank champagne and brainstormed all the implications of making all that stuff available. Sadly, I focused on the pretty girl and the champagne when I could have become Al Gore!