Fresh UGA Data

Finally got around to looking at fresh Fall 2014 data from UGA. This is only fulltime undergrads, and a first quick hit. I'll write more tomorrow. A few points:

• In Fall 1998, Gwinnett County sent the most students to UGA of any other county. It's the same in Fall 2014.
• The other top counties look little different. Some jostling here and there, but basically the big Atlanta metro counties dominate (Fulton, Cobb, DeKalb).
• Forsyth County is 6th in the latest data. It was 20th in 1998. Credit population growth.
• Clarke County (Athens) was 6th in 1998. It's 7th now. No real change.
• But next door Oconee County has climbed from 11th to 10th.
• Bibb County was 10th. Now it's 15th.

Back in 1998, DeKalb, Fulton, Cobb, Clarke, and Clayton counties sent the most black students to UGA. Today it's Gwinnett, DeKalb, Fulton, Cobb, and Clayton counties. Clarke is 8th. Oconee County used to be ranked 17th in terms of number of black students sent. It's now 27th.

I'll play more with this as time allows, maybe do some mapping. Also, it's fun to look at gender breakdowns by county over time.

Twitter Reaction to Best Journalism School Poll

The RTDNA survey to rank the top journalism programs, has generated some reaction via Twitter, most of it is from Mizzou folks noting they're "far and away" #1, and rightly so. Even if it's a methodologically flawed poll, you have to admit Mizzou is a helluva program. So ya get tweets like:

"far and away" #1 RT @MizzouNews NewsPro-RTDNA Poll Ranks MU as the top-ranked School of Journalism http://t.co/uvtwC5kyez
— Patrick Terpstra (@PatrickTerpstra) December 18, 2014

and

J-school was "once again far and away the No. 1 choice as the top J-school in the country." http://t.co/CsK3hz6czC @JESS_is_a_mess_
— Chris Brown STL (@cbrownstl) December 17, 2014

All well and good. As I mentioned in my post from the link above, UGA (where I teach) finished 2nd (Go Dawgs). Setting aside our own congratulatory tweets, others wondered about why their school didn't finish higher. For example:

Ugh we made the list but we need to step it up @UFJSchool http://t.co/9Mp4T28PxG
— matthew ramirez (@MattRamirez58) December 17, 2014

and

RTDNA : The Top 20 Journalism Schools 2014: How is #USC Annenberg not in the top 10? http://t.co/nue0pnLTGa
— Terry Anzur (@terryanzur) December 17, 2014

I can answer that last one. You probably didn't have someone go out of their way to recruit people to vote. Look hard at the list. Many names you expect to see, one or two are -- let's be honest -- kinda surprising. Troy University? Lyndon State College? Fine schools, I'm sure, but nowhere near as good as many of the programs beneath them. Read my earlier post above for my methodological critique, or see the graf below.

Let me put my PhDweeb hat on for a second. It's damn near impossible to define what makes a program "top" or "best," and it's even more difficult to objectively craft a way to measure what you mean by "top" or "best" and you certainly don't turn it into a beauty contest by having people vote in a way in which they can be recruited. Now, you sputter, if everyone recruits then that all comes out in the wash. No, I reply, you can't assume some systematic bias in that. Some schools are likely to recruit more, take it more seriously, and I suspect that is seen in some of the results.

What makes a program the best? The one that works for you, the student. Finally, I leave you with this tweet, which I think gets at the heart of the matter:

RTDNA survey claims it names "Top 20 Journalism Schools" but produces another oddly mixed list #edshift http://t.co/cXPoHklNpx
— Eric Newton (@EricNewton1) December 17, 2014

Top 20 Journalism Schools

UGA is #2 with a bullet.

Okay, not much of a bullet, up from #3 to #2 in the methodologically challenged RTDNA survey of the "top 20 journalism schools."

• See the latest survey.

• See my earlier blog on the poll's methodological flaws.

A bit about the survey from the site:

The survey was distributed on TVWeek.com and to members of the Radio Television Digital News Association, with 673 respondents participating. A total of 607 of those respondents answered the question about their professional status; of those, 260 (42.8%) said they were news professionals. Additionally, 169 (27.8%) answered non-news professionals, 104 (17.1%) identi†fied as students, and 74 (12.2%) said they were educators.

I'm not sure why over a quarter are "non-news professionals" but I find that kinda interesting. PR people? Broadcast folks not directly involved in news? Keep in mind, as I emphasize on my earlier blog post, these 673 respondents are not representative. This is not a random sample, but ratger rather a convenience sample, a SLOP (self-selected opinion poll), and again as my earlier post points out you could with a little effort to vote again and again, or recruit your students or alumni to vote -- which of course biases the results toward larger programs.

Finally, from the story, I leave you with this quote from a UGA student (or faculty, or alumnus, or digital passerby) who managed to misspell a kinda key word (I boldfaced it for ya):

“University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication has well-trained professors who truly care about giving students experience in all areas of telecommuncations. It shows with the wide range of Grady students involved in the journalism industry around the country.”

UPDATE

Yeah, I misspelled "rather" above. This is what happens when you write in a hurry between one doc visit about surgery for your kid and another about your own friggin cancer. Bite me.

Dream College List

So here's the hed from a site:

The Official List Of Dream Colleges
High School Students
Wish They Could Attend 

And you think, wow, that's some list. Wouldn't Ivy schools be at the top? Or maybe Hawaii? You'd be wrong. The list itself, such as it is, can be found here, but lemme discuss my favorite topic -- methodology.

First, what's the school people dream they could attend?

1. University of Michigan

Don't get me wrong, Michigan is a helluva school, maybe the best public university in the country, but does anyone actually dream of being in Michigan? Especially in, say, February?

2. San Diego State University

Okay, terrific weather, an okay school, but ya dream about it? Really? There are some other oddities on the list, as in #7 being University of Alabama. Other than football, there's no real reason to dream of being there. Ole Miss is #18. Okay, maybe. It is a pretty place, though no academic powerhouse. And UGA comes in at #25. I can buy that.

Important note -- not a single Ivy is on the list. I'm fairly sure people dream about Harvard more than they do about Ole Miss.

Okay, so exactly how did they come up with this "dream" list? You tell me, because I can't find any mention of methodology. There is a funny comment at the bottom of the piece, basically a WTF response. If you find the method to this madness, lemme know. Best I can tell, a lot of this site's stuff is generated by one guy in a kinda sorta Buzzfeed ripoff style with lots of silly (some funny) lists.

Baffled

Sometimes I have no friggin idea what UGA is doing. Below is a message on "Athena," our new computer system that along with "Banner" has royally screwed things up for lots of people to the point where we're changing policies to fit what our system will allow us to do:

Please submit the grades often. There is a 35 minute time limit starting at 01:48 pm on Dec 12, 2014 for this page.

Is this like voting early and often? Do I submit the same grade over and over again? Is this a race? What? I entered a grade for a directed reading. Do I enter it again? Huh?

Sigh.

Instead of Athena or Banner, maybe they should have named it Hal. Or SkyNet.


 

A Favorite Paper, Shot Down

I enjoy researching people's beliefs in conspiracy theories, but my latest paper got shot down by a top journal. That's okay. It happens. I haven't actually read the comments yet -- I like to let them sit for a day or two before reading why my manuscript sucks -- and I'm not sure whether it's worth sending out elsewhere. It's a neat idea, this paper, as it looks at beliefs in conspiracy theories from the left and right, but I dunno that it's neat enough or the results strong enough to justify publication. Maybe I'll use it as a conference paper at some point.

Oh, and here's a previous blog post that gives a bit about the paper at an earlier stage.

I admit I kinda struggled with it at times. One aspect that hurt is there are few surprises in the results. Liberals believe the worst about conservatives via conspiracy theories, and vice versa. It does include what I think is a useful analysis of individual differences that might also explain conspiratorial beliefs beyond mere partisanship and ideology (anxiety, financial uncertainty, and interpersonal trust). There are sound theoretical reasons why they might be expected to play a role. In general, after controlling for ideology, etc., people who tend not to trust others also believe in conspiracy theories of the left and the right. Not a great media angle there, but kinda neat.

As to the media stuff, the results are unsurprising. Watching Fox News predicted believing the conspiracy theories about Obama but not about Bush. Neat, though, is that after all these controls, watching comedy news programs The Daily Show and The Colbert Report was associated with not believing any of the theories, regardless of their direction.

Fun with ACC Jail Data

Yes, you too can have fun with jail data. I looked at arrests over the last seven days, via this site, and dumped it into a spreadsheet. Why? Because I should be grading, but this is more fun (if you are liberal in exactly how you define fun).

So what's the data tell us? There were 11 Hispanics, 97 whites and 122 blacks arrested. What's fun is to break down some of the charges by race. See the table below for the UGA-effect on the ACC jail. Underage possession, open container, fake ID -- those wacky college kids -- are all white. Battery, improper driving, criminal trespass are less so.

	Black	Hispanic	White
Underage Possession	0	0	12
Open Container	0	0	3
Possession False ID	0	0	4
Simple Battery	8	0	1
Improper Driving	4	1	1
Criminal Trespass	11	0	3

Is there some deeper meaning to the data above? None at all, other than college kids getting arrested for booze.