Talk:Georgetown University

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Student demographics charts

Median family income of undergraduate students   Top 20% (72.7%)   Second quintile (11.4%)   Third quintile (8.0%)   Fourth quintile (4.8%)   Bottom 20% (3.2%)

Racial and ethnic composition of undergraduate student body† (fall 2019)   White (48.8%)   Hispanic (9.5%)   Asian (10.4%)   Black (6.3%)   Native American (0.1%)   Pacific Islander (0.1%)   Multiracial (4.6%)   International (15.5%)   Unknown (4.7%) † "Hispanic" includes Hispanics of any race. All other categories refer to non-Hispanics.

Most university pages have a table in the student body section with the ethnic/racial demographics (see e.g. FA University of Michigan#Enrollment). I think that a pie chart would be a better way to present this information, so I added one for racial demographics to this page near where the statistics are listed, but I was reverted by Drevolt (edit summary: Thanks, but I don’t think that a chart is necessary here). I think that the chart is appropriate, since the demographics are important encyclopedic information that can be better understood with the chart. Additionally, I think it would also be appropriate to add a chart for the socioeconomic demographics of the student body, as shown at right. What do you all think? (Note: it could be updated if someone wants to fetch more recent data^{done myself}; also, if the colors are too jarring, consider joining this convo.) {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 22:24, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

Hi @Sdkb: I’m obviously in favor of including demographics in some form, since these statistics are relevant to the university. My concern is that the racial and economic composition of a student body are not so significant that a graphical representation is necessary, since it’s not a fundamental part of the page’s topic in the way that demographics are to, say, the article for a country. Note that I would feel similarly about most statistics relevant to a university page: Relevant enough to include, but not relevant enough to warrant including a chart or graph. Of course, inclusion criteria might be different in the case of a separate article that is specifically about the student body of a university. —Drevolt (talk) 22:57, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying your views. I think we disagree about appropriate WP:WEIGHT here, so I'm curious what others think. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 23:19, 9 August 2020 (UTC)

I'm ambivalent about these charts. If other schools start using them, and there's an expectation for seeing them, maybe even a "Template:Student body" that we'd fill out, then sure. My slight concern is that they're just baubles, colorful wikitrinkets that don't add much to the page that's not in the prose. And prose is king, there's always circumstances when those charts might not be visible to readers. I also wish the data was more up to date. Seven years is a while, and no one counted in that survey is presumably still at the school.-- Patrick, _oѺ^∞ 19:32, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

Patrickneil, I don't know about any other schools using pie charts, but it's what the best country demographics pages use (e.g. 1), and the strong majority of other FA college pages have a table, which takes up about the same amount of space. Regarding updating the data, I just updated it with the 2019–20 numbers from here. I could see us making it into a template, but since we'd still have to enter the data individually and there are a lot of things that'd need tweaking from school to school, I'm not sure it'd be worth it. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 19:55, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

The race and ethnicity data are in IPEDS so they can be systematically dealt with e.g., pulled from Wikidata (after ensuring that is up-to-date, maintained, and accurate), populated using a bot.

That the family income data are not readily available in a systematic format reinforces my concern that it may be undue for us to try to add this information to articles. ElKevbo (talk) 20:22, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

ElKevbo, a bot updating the data would be fantastic—it's not an efficient use of editor time to be manually updating widely used data that's available in a machine-readable format. We might have to kick Wikidata to get them ready to host it, though, since they don't have a good property for it currently. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 20:33, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

There is already some IPEDS data in Wikidata so this might already be there. I haven't checked and I have no idea how frequently the IPEDS data in Wikidata are updated nor do I know anything about their data stewardship practices and standards. ElKevbo (talk) 20:40, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

ElKevbo, if we had universal good data, we could get fancy, such as wrapping the charts using {{switcher}} so that it would display probably ethnicity by default but could display gender, income, geography, or others if the reader clicks. That, combined with a few needed upgrades to {{Pie chart}} (e.g. getting the hover effects demonstrated here, plus tooltips) would be the sort of thing that would get us out of the 2000s technologically. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 20:45, 11 August 2020 (UTC)

References

Dispute over "top feeder school for careers in finance and investment banking on Wall Street" in lede

Two editors are in a dispute about the addition of this sentence to the lede of this article:

Georgetown is also a top feeder school for careers in finance and investment banking on Wall Street.

I agree that this material does not belong in the lede of this article. The simplest reason why this doesn't belong in the lede is that the lede is intended to be a summary of what's in the body of the article and this is not in the body of the article. Beyond that, we should not include material in the lede that is only reported once in one source. If it's information that is so important that it needs to be among the very first bits of information that readers see in this article then surely you can find multiple sources that support it. ElKevbo (talk) 23:38, 28 October 2020 (UTC)

I agree with your first point that this is not something talked about in the body of the article. I didn't know that was a rule so I think you're right that it shouldn't be in the lede. Perhaps it should be somewhere else? I feel it's definitely relevant enough to be mentioned somewhere. There are other sources you can find on the internet that would say Georgetown is a feeder to banking/finance- here is another one putting them in the top 10 for Wall Street placement https://www.collegetransitions.com/dataverse/top-feeders-banking. I could find more if you think they'd be helpful? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:806:4301:DB40:D2F:63D8:246B:A249 (talk) 01:53, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

Definitely don't edit war, but no, I don't think "top feeder school for careers in finance" is something we need to specifically mention. Its vague and is the sort of WP:PUFF that university articles are trying to eliminate. Specific numbers or percents might be better, but the ones that CNN source uses, that 62 alumni started as financial analysts in 2014, don't seem very significant to me. But a sentence in the Alumni section saying "As of June 2020, 136 alumni worked in Wall Street finance firms" using that other link wouldn't be the worst. It's certainly better than just the listing of famous alums that the section is mostly.-- Patrick, _oѺ^∞ 02:26, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

Yeah I agree something like that could be good. Important to note though that the numbers in that survey- 136 for Georgetown, 149 for Yale, etc- aren't the total numbers that each school has on Wall Street they're just the number of people from each of those schools that responded out of the ~8k people on Wall Street that were reached out to for the survey. Wall Street would be absurdly small if those were the total numbers for each school. So I think that saying as of 2020 it places heavily onto/is a top feeder to Wall Street and citing this survey would be fine. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:806:4301:DB40:9D68:9870:D4A4:7CD1 (talk) 02:12, 1 November 2020 (UTC)

• I'm sorta borderline on this. I do think it's important to characterize the types of careers alumni are most likely to pursue in the lead. The extremely strong ties Georgetown has to government certainly qualifies; the more U.S. diplomats than any other university and many members of the United States Congress we currently have is warranted. As for finance, I'm not quite so sure; I'd need to be a little more familiar with Georgetown's precise reputation to judge how important that part of it is. But the CNN source looks perfectly reliable to me; it's going off of LinkedIn data, which we'd expect to be fairly comprehensive given the platform's ubiquity (the only qualm I have is whether they properly weighted by student body size). Looking at other articles, for some we use the number of billionaire graduates as a way to highlight an institution's alumni success in business; maybe we could add that to the list here if we can find the number? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 22:29, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

References

Alumni section ballooning

The alumni section here has grown way too large for this summary article. We have a fantastic List of Georgetown University alumni article that features all of these names, and there is no need to itemize the names in the prose or with an image gallery, which is specifically discouraged on Wikipedia articles. As of today, I count 70 individual names listed. I feel strongly that is simply too many, that many of the individuals are just trivial, and featuring them is a form of puffery. Individuals should ideally be included as part of a larger statement about alumni, and not because they attended the school and later became famous, i.e. "Georgetown's alumni include more U.S. diplomats than any other university,^[source] such as...".^[source] The first paragraph here is the sort we want, sourced data about the alumni as a large group, rather than one individual out of hundreds of thousands. Please leave the listing to the actual list article. Sound good?-- Patrick, _oѺ^∞ 18:10, 6 November 2020 (UTC)

I went through and tried to put my suggestion into action, by rewriting sentences to put the school programs or a statement about broader alumni first, followed by individual examples. I've culled the names down to 40, which still seems like a lot to me. And I replaced the image gallery with a photo of graduation. I've never felt that government portraits were the best option to illustrate this university's article. If there are to be photos of individual alumni, I think it should be of them speaking on campus, meeting with other alumni, or doing something related to the school. We previously used this image of Bill Clinton, John Podesta, and Jack DeGioia, but its kind of a weird angle and it kind of looks like Jack is saying "please don't touch me." Alternatively, there is a 37 minute public domain video of Clinton speaking at his Georgetown class reunion in 1993. Its spot on the topic, but I'm not sure the thumbnail reads well, so I'm happy to entertain alternative suggestions or better photos from graduations if editors have them.-- Patrick, _oѺ^∞ 16:44, 8 November 2020 (UTC)

New schools

The university announced it would create two new schools by 2022 out of the School of Nursing and Health Studies: the School of Nursing and the School of Health. When the time comes that they are actually created, they will have to be added to the constituent schools table under #Academics. It is unclear to me from the announcement whether one or both will be considered continuations of the current NHS, for purposes of ascertaining their dates of founding. Ergo Sum 03:11, 8 December 2020 (UTC)