Compara Carreras
An online platform that presents data to help prospective college students make evidence-based decisions about their choice of academic major from an economic perspective.
Project Description
ComparaCarreras.org (CompareMajors, in Spanish) is an interactive tool for prospective college students to view and compare key labor-market indicators for graduates of different academic majors. Its goals are to help young people make evidence-based decisions and to consider an economic perspective when choosing an academic major in college. The site presents profiles for most university study programs in Mexico, with data such as earnings, tuition costs, employment rates, and return on investment, and allows easy comparisons between different majors.
How was I Involved in this project?
I was responsible for maintaining the website and presenting an annual data update, along with a launch campaign that included communication materials, a press conference, and radio and TV interviews. I worked on or supervised most tasks in this project: from collecting and processing large-scale, nationally representative household surveys in R to supervising a team of 4 research assistants in collecting a survey on college tuition costs and creating files for the site’s database. For the communication strategy, I drafted press releases, social media materials, and a presentation that used the project’s results to show young people planning to attend college what they gain by using ComparaCarreras.
It was my responsibility to coordinate all these tasks with IMCO’s leadership, its communications teams, and the web developers. As this was a recurring project, I wrote scripts to make almost all aspects of data processing and analysis fully reproducible, and I consider this experience the moment I began to really enjoy working on larger projects in R.
Additional content for this project can be found below and in the links beneath this page’s main title.
