While at Georgia Tech, there always seemed to be an inordinate number of students from Florida (after Georgia of course because it's a public school). I've constantly heard people mention that there are soooo many people from Florida that it finally dawned on me to investigate further. At first, I attributed this to a combination of Florida being geographically close to Georgia. However, it always bothered me that Florida is a populous state and they should naturally be overrepresented compared with other states.
TL;DR: No.
To answer this question, I needed:
- The number of students at GT by state
- The number of people in the US by state
- A way to read all of this data (preferably in Python)
- A basic understanding of fractions
Georgia Tech publishes a Fact Book which contains a lot of really neat stuff about all things related to Geogia Tech. In particular, I was interested in the enrollment of students by state. Note that this data is from 2015.
I found lots of information on state populations on Wikipedia. I chose to use the estimated 2016 statistics as opposed to the 2010 census data because I was only interested in percentages of people living in each state and I figured recent estimated figures were better than known, old figures.
I didn't feel like manually extracting the data from either webpage and I didn't feel like directly parsing the HTML and extracting the table data automatically. Instead, I extracted the tables with Google Sheets and exported them as CSVs. I also had to do a small amount of cleaning. In particular, I unbolded the line for "Georgia" on the GT data and deleted a couple of weird lines in both datasets.
Then I made a little python script (normalize.py) which reads by CSVs, figures out what percentage of the population lives in each state, compares that to the percentage of students enrolled from each state, and prints out a pretty table. (I actually needed to run pip install tabulate to create the pretty table).
Note that Wikipedia includes a more complete list of "state-like-things" like territories. I ended up deleting a couple of territories from each CSV if the other CSV didn't have that territory in it.
You can run the script yourself with:
python normalize.py > table.txt
First and foremost, I was unsurprised that Georgians are vastly overrepresented at GT. It's a fantastic state school and, if I was paying in-state tuition, I couldn't imagine going to any other engineering school without a huge scholarship.
At the bottom of the list, we can see that California, Texas, and New York are underrepresented at the school. All three of those states have huge populations and other in-state schools to pick from. California in particular has many wonderful in-state universities which would be very hard to refuse compared with out-of-state tuition at GT.
And finally, we get to Florida. From the data, we can see that Florida is (I assume statistically insignificantly) slightly underrepresented at GT. At first glance, this would imply that Florida is appropriately represented on campus.
Unfortunately, this goes directly against a consensus of public opinions. Why do people think there are so many Floridians when there really aren't? After looking at the data a bit, something looked a bit weird. Other really populous states (CA, NY, TX) are underrepresented on campus which makes them appear more in line with less populous states. However, Floridians ignore that trend and flock to GT. Why? Probably a combination of geography and lack of good universities in Florida. Looking at what percentage of students go to out-of-state schools would be enlightening (although I have a hunch economic prosperity will be a stronger indicator than school choice). All of this culminates in Floridians being the second largest group on campus by a long shot.
Below is a table of all of the interesting fields in the CSVs I extracted. The Difference column is just GT Percent - US Percent as a percentage. For even raw-er data, check out the two CSVs directly.
State GT Pop US Pop GT Percent US Percent Difference
-------------------- -------- -------- ------------ ------------ ------------
Georgia 9045 10310371 0.678443 0.0315473 64%
New Jersey 290 8944469 0.0217522 0.027368 0%
Virginia 258 8411808 0.0193519 0.0257382 0%
Tennessee 176 6651194 0.0132013 0.0203511 0%
Maryland 212 6016447 0.0159016 0.0184089 0%
South Carolina 108 4961119 0.00810081 0.0151799 0%
Alabama 102 4863300 0.00765077 0.0148806 0%
Kentucky 51 4436974 0.00382538 0.0135761 0%
Connecticut 94 3576452 0.00705071 0.0109431 0%
Puerto Rico 42 3411307 0.00315032 0.0104378 0%
Iowa 6 3134693 0.000450045 0.00959142 0%
Utah 2 3051217 0.000150015 0.00933601 0%
Mississippi 17 2988726 0.00127513 0.0091448 0%
Arkansas 17 2988248 0.00127513 0.00914334 0%
Nevada 11 2940058 0.000825083 0.00899589 0%
Kansas 13 2907289 0.000975098 0.00889562 0%
New Mexico 6 2081015 0.000450045 0.00636742 0%
Nebraska 12 1907116 0.00090009 0.00583533 0%
West Virginia 6 1831102 0.000450045 0.00560274 0%
Idaho 6 1683140 0.000450045 0.00515001 0%
Hawaii 3 1428557 0.000225023 0.00437105 0%
New Hampshire 29 1334795 0.00217522 0.00408416 0%
Maine 12 1331479 0.00090009 0.00407401 0%
Rhode Island 7 1056426 0.000525053 0.00323242 0%
Montana 0 1042520 0 0.00318987 0%
Delaware 26 952065 0.0019502 0.0029131 0%
South Dakota 3 865454 0.000225023 0.00264809 0%
North Dakota 4 757952 0.00030003 0.00231916 0%
Alaska 5 741894 0.000375038 0.00227002 0%
District of Columbia 12 681170 0.00090009 0.00208422 0%
Vermont 12 624594 0.00090009 0.00191111 0%
Wyoming 2 585501 0.000150015 0.0017915 0%
Guam 4 161785 0.00030003 0.000495024 0%
U.S. Virgin Islands 2 103574 0.000150015 0.000316912 0%
Florida 658 20612439 0.0493549 0.0630692 -1%
North Carolina 277 10146788 0.0207771 0.0310468 -1%
Washington 44 7288000 0.00330033 0.0222996 -1%
Arizona 47 6931071 0.00352535 0.0212075 -1%
Massachusetts 137 6811779 0.010276 0.0208424 -1%
Indiana 18 6633053 0.00135014 0.0202956 -1%
Missouri 53 6093000 0.0039754 0.0186431 -1%
Wisconsin 28 5778708 0.00210021 0.0176815 -1%
Colorado 64 5540545 0.00480048 0.0169528 -1%
Minnesota 31 5519952 0.00232523 0.0168898 -1%
Louisiana 48 4681666 0.00360036 0.0143248 -1%
Oregon 27 4093465 0.0020252 0.012525 -1%
Oklahoma 12 3923561 0.00090009 0.0120052 -1%
Pennsylvania 217 12802503 0.0162766 0.0391727 -2%
Illinois 166 12801539 0.0124512 0.0391697 -2%
Ohio 109 11614373 0.00817582 0.0355373 -2%
Michigan 27 9928301 0.0020252 0.0303783 -2%
New York 222 19745289 0.0166517 0.0604159 -4%
Texas 276 27862596 0.0207021 0.085253 -6%
California 276 39250017 0.0207021 0.120096 -9%
The code is licensed under the MIT license. Georgia Tech probably holds the copyright on their student data. I'm not entirely sure who owns the US census data because things published by the government are frequently in the public domain because the public paid for them.