Data Journalism Visualization Proposal

So for this assignment, we as students in the class have to come up with a story that can be relevant to college students that can be shown using a data chart to give our audience a visual of the data. I thought about it a lot and I figured that I could do a story pertaining to the drop out rates amongst college students in America. Being that the amount of college students dropping out of their universities is growing, I thought it would be interesting to look at the drop out rate of students from the last fifteen years. The reason as to why I want to just do the last fifteen years is because it is recent and I also wanted to include the recent COVID-19 pandemic to see how that may have impacted students and the drop out rates. I believe this story could be very newsworthy for college students and students at Slippery Rock in general simply because of the impact it has on all of the students of America, the timeliness because of the fifteen years I would be covering, and just the simple human interest.

I am not entirely sure if I should do the drop out rates of all of America though simply because I would like to add that proximity aspect for newsworthiness. So I guess I am just proposing the question as to whether people would be more interested in the drop out rates of college students just here at Slippery Rock in the last fifteen years? If I were to do the drop out rates of college students in overall America, I would talk to admissions here at Slippery Rock to see if they would have any reason as to why the drop out rates are increasing. If I were to do just Slippery Rock, I feel as if admissions here might have a better understanding as to why students around here are dropping out at an increasing rate.