Graduated Life Explore: An Interactive Visualization Tool to Explore the Comprehensive Benefits of a Timely Graduation

Abstract

This Research Work in Progress paper presents preliminary results on an interactive visualization tool intended for university students to explore different motivational reasons to graduate from college timely. The statistics on the number of students who graduate from university “on-time” makes one wonder if the four-year completion rate is a myth. In reality, some statistics show less than a third graduate in four years, and almost half graduate by six years. Several reasons lead to needing more years to graduate. For example, graduation may be delayed due to the extra time required to repeat a failed or dropped course. Currently, there is a lack of comprehensive methods for college students to analyze datasets on graduation rates and the effects on other aspects of their lives. In this paper, we examine whether an interactive visualization tool can inform students about the short-term and long-term life effects for extending their graduation from four years to five, six, or more years. The benefit for students to use this tool is to give them a holistic understanding of how their current time in college affects future opportunities. In addition, college mentors and advisers can share this tool with students during advising sessions. We assume our primary audience is a computer science major from “Anonymized University” and aggregate various datasets to design and implement an interactive visualization tool, called “Graduated Life Explore.” This tool helps students explore different motivational reasons on the advantages of graduating, as well as the possible risks and disadvantages of delaying their college graduation. We discuss several benefits including net costs, extracurricular activities, financial aid possibilities, career opportunities, retirement plans, health insurance, and more. These reasons are represented and encoded into our interactive visualization tool which employs multiple coordinated views on different datasets including timeline pie charts with interactive pop out charts. We explore the effectiveness of this interactive visualization tool through a usability study on students at “Anonymized University”.