Chicago College Success Project

Context of Project: I worked on this project as a data research assistant at the UChicago Inclusive Economy Lab. I entered the project after the landscape scan and worked in the program evaluation stage.

Project Synopsis: First-generation college students and students from minority populations face numerous barriers to get into and succeed in college. The Chicago College Success project seeks to analyze various college access and college success programs that serve high school students in Chicago Public Schools, focusing its attention on first-generation and underrepresented college students. First, the Inclusive Economy Lab conducted a landscape scan of 34 college access and success providers. Next, they conducted program evaluations of 5 partner organizations with different program models. Eventually, the Lab will also do a meta-analysis to understand "patterns in which types of supports are most effective for different groups of students."

My Role: I completed a qualitative report and began the quasi-experimental study of one of the partner organizatons, Enlace.

• Wrote R (dplyr) scripts to wrangle large public datasets (Chicago Public School data), clean partner CSVs, and format into dataframes.
• Wrote R - flextables, ggplot - scripts to create data visualizations that will summarize qualitative characteristics.
• Wrote an RMarkdown to create a cumulative qualitative report.
• Wrote R scripts to run regressions and statistical tests to model and analyze data (t-tests, z-tests, log regs, linear regs).

Technologies Used: R (ggplot2, tidyverse-dplyr, flextable, stargazer), RMarkdown