Public and Private College Costs
Average cost for private colleges is more than double public college costs. Tuition accounts for almost all of the difference, as shown in the cascade chart on the right. Tuition has been increasing slightly more quickly in public colleges over the past decade, but the gap is still quite large, as shown in the line chart on the left. Data are from the College Board's Trends in College Pricing 2019.
Public and Private College Costs in a Cascade Chart and Tuition Increases in a Line Chart
How I Made these College Costs Cascade and Line Charts
Here is the college costs data that I used to create the cascade chart (above) and line chart:
Here's how I made the cascade chart with bar comparison line on the left:
- create a cascade chart in PowerPoint
- type college costs data for public and private colleges as in columns B and H above from the College Board report
- use formulas to calculate difference between public and private college costs for the data in columns C-G
- combine books and supplies, transportation and other expenses into an 'other expenses row and column
- set last bar as total cascade bar
- hide series and bars for books and supplies and transportation
- add legend, show at bottom of chart
- hide y axis line, tick marks and labels and add y axis title
- adjust internal margins
- change series colors
- add bar comparison line
I then closed the chart, reduced the size of the container to half chart, opened the chart and made any needed adjustments in margins. I then created the line chart on the right from data I downloaded from the College Board report as shown in the datasheet above. I added the segment comparison lines to the chart to show the rate of increase in public and private college costs.
Take This Chart and Make It Your Own
Download this chart and edit it using Mekko Graphics. See more cascade charts in our chart gallery. Here are some other charts that may be of interest:
