{
  "alt": "County map of the United States shaded by the distance from the average resident to the nearest four-year college. Counties at the high end of the key are concentrated in Alaska, the Great Plains and the interior West, and counties at the low end are mostly in metro areas.",
  "caption": "The {fact:n_top_class} counties in the highest class of the key, {fact:top_break} miles or more, are mostly in Alaska, the Great Plains and the interior West, and the counties in the lowest class are mostly metro counties. No four-year campus lies inside {fact:n_no_college} of the {fact:n_counties} counties; the tooltip gives the number of campuses in each county.",
  "data": [],
  "id": "college_distance_map",
  "notes": [
    "Every county on the map has a value: each has residents, and the distance is measured to a campus in any of the 50 states or DC. Puerto Rico is not drawn and its campuses and residents are not in the data. Alaska and Hawaii distances cross water, so a county on an island or in the bush has a distance that no road or ferry covers.",
    "Four-year means a campus the IPEDS directory lists at the four-year level, leaving out the {fact:n_grad_only} institutions the Scorecard classes as entirely graduate-degree granting; {fact:n_campuses} campuses remain, with branch campuses counted at their own addresses. Connecticut is drawn as its eight legacy counties, with each tract and campus assigned to its legacy county.",
    "The second view measures the distance to the nearest public four-year campus. County values are full counts of tracts and campuses and carry no sampling interval; the intervals in the gradient figure treat counties as draws. Distance is a measure of supply, not of where residents enroll."
  ],
  "source": "IPEDS 2023 directory (campus locations), 2020 Census tract internal points, American Community Survey 2019-2023 (tract population); population-weighted, full counts",
  "spec": {
    "fips": "fips",
    "legendLabel": "Miles from the average resident to the nearest four-year campus",
    "payload": "college_distance_map.json",
    "scale": {
      "palette": "seq",
      "thresholds": [
        5,
        10,
        25,
        50,
        100
      ],
      "type": "threshold"
    },
    "tooltipKeys": [
      "colleges"
    ],
    "tooltipLabels": {
      "colleges": "Four-year campuses in the county"
    },
    "value": "miles",
    "valueFormat": {
      "digits": 1
    }
  },
  "subtitle": "Distance in miles from the average resident of each county to the nearest four-year campus (great-circle, from each census tract's internal point, weighted by tract population), campuses of 2023, residents of 2019 to 2023",
  "title": "The average resident in the country lives {fact:dist_all} miles from a four-year college, and the state averages are longest in Alaska, Wyoming, Montana and Mississippi",
  "type": "county-map",
  "views": [
    {
      "id": "any",
      "label": "Any four-year campus"
    },
    {
      "caption": "Distances to a public four-year campus are longer than distances to any four-year campus in most counties.",
      "id": "public",
      "label": "Public four-year campus",
      "spec": {
        "legendLabel": "Miles from the average resident to the nearest public four-year campus",
        "value": "miles_public"
      },
      "title": "The average resident lives {fact:dist_all_pub} miles from a public four-year college, further than the {fact:dist_all} miles to any four-year college"
    }
  ],
  "width": "full"
}