Another XQuery Use Case: Is Higher Education Countercyclical?

I’ve completed another XQuery demonstration project (for earlier ones, see XQuery). In this version I used XQuery to assemble data to consider anew the conventional wisdom that higher education is countercyclical (ie, enrollments grow during recessions).

Here’s a sample graph from the report. It shows the annual percentage change in enrollments from all U.S. degree-granting institutions of higher education from 1968 to 2007. The grayscale background shows unemployment rates and periods of recessions. The report is available in this pdf that includes better resolution graphics.

Here is an abbreviated version of the summary section from the report.

1. The new XQuery use cases included screen scraping enrollment data embedded in html, and the pipelining of enrollment and economic data through several staged transformations.
2. The evidence that higher education in the United States is countercyclical appears weak based on the exploratory analysis done here.
3. The evidence varies somewhat by institutional control and type, but mostly the general observation of a weak association between enrollment change and recession cycles holds true.
4. The tools used in this project, XQuery and R, are wonderful research tools but are not suitable for more general use without wrappers that mute their complexity.
5. The screen-scraping technique used in this project provides another access route to a vast amount of U.S. Department of Education data on the web.
6. None of the data sources used in this project included semantic or linked data markup. Whether XQuery can be used successfully with RDFa or microformats seems worthy of investigation.

Here are links to various pieces of this project:
a. Final report
b. Documentation for XQuery source programs
c. XQuery to generate enrollment data
d. XQuery to generate unemployment and recession data
e. XQuery to merge enrollment, unemployment, and recession data
f. R analysis history

I remain quite satisfied with XQuery.