State-by-State Comparisons Just a Click Away

Did you know that:

• Pennsylvania ranks first among the states in the net in-migration of students? New Jersey ranks last, with a net out-migration of 18,816.
• New York has the largest number of science graduate students on temporary visas (1,824 in 2001) and Vermont ranks last, with only 70?
• Idaho had the most patent filings per 100,000 persons in 2003, whereas California ranked first in sheer volume of patents filed, at 22,075?

How do we know these things? Is it by painstakingly downloading the data from various federal and trade web sites and then ranking in Excel—over and over and over again until the rankings are ready, just in time for a new year to be released?

No, we use the Indiana Business Research Center’s (IBRC) new States IN Profile. Thousands of economic and demographic indicators are now available on the web, anytime you want them, greatly simplifying retrieval of a wide cross-section of comparative data. States IN Profile is a new component of the IBRC’s STATS Indiana web service (www.stats.indiana.edu) that provides very detailed profiles of each state and the District of Columbia, as well as an easy way to compare states on any variable. STATS Indiana already provides county-by-county comparisons for all 3,141 counties in the nation through the USA Counties IN Profile component.

A year in the making, States IN Profile focuses on annual, quarterly, and monthly indicators for the economy, education, income, population, and workforce for each state. The majority of sources used are federal agencies. The IBRC has expanded its already sizable database to include state-level indicators; in the process, we have refined an input, verification, and maintenance process critical to keeping the profiles up-to-date. Custom web output programming lets users easily view data and rankings for all states. Individual contacts were made with each and every source, resulting in a calendar of release dates and a set of metadata for each data set.

Unique to both States IN Profile and USA Counties IN Profile is the linked-rank feature. Users can click on the rank of a particular state for an indicator in any given table and instantly see the entire list of states ranked for that same indicator. In this way, one can identify a state’s peers or competitors. The rankings themselves are not the primary focus, of course, but they do provide geographic context and easy comparisons among the states.

There are confirmations and surprises to be found when using States IN Profile:

• Maryland and Alaska have the highest median wage for healthcare practitioner and technical jobs.
• Hawaii ranks second in the nation for the percent of workers in unions (23.8%), after California (24.6%).
• Tennessee had the most bankruptcies per 1,000 population in 2003 (11 per 1,000).
• Between 1999 and 2003, Texas, South Carolina, Ohio, Indiana, and Tennessee had the largest percentage growth in the value of exports (adj. to 2003 dollars).
• Florida has the largest domestic net in-migration; California has the largest international net in-migration.

Of course, many of you data-lovers already knew some or all of these trivia. But States IN Profile offers a consistently maintained and updated resource for such information, integrating data series from a variety of sources into one convenient location.

States IN Profile is the first step in Indiana’s push to develop a consistent and publicly accessible set of benchmarks for Indiana’s performance. And because our state is committed to public access to this information, anyone anywhere can take advantage of these comparative statistics for states and counties. Since many AUBER members live and breathe data, we hope you will find this a useful tool.

The next step in our development of these tools is to make the data you see in a state profile available as a time-series for easy download.

Viewing the rankings and the in-depth state profiles inspires many questions: Why do so many students leave New Jersey to attend college in other states? Why does Indiana have such a high average wage per job in the Arts and Recreation sector? What is happening in Idaho that gives them such a high ratio of patent filings to population AND such significant growth in gross state product quantity index (31.1, where 1996=100) between 1996 and 2001?

We welcome your answers to these questions! Please e-mail Jerry Conover or Carol Rogers, or share your interpretations via the AUBER listserv.

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