No Cap After The Cap: The Truth After Graduation

Inspiration

Graduation is often presented as the moment when education turns into opportunity. But for many college graduates, getting the degree is only the beginning of a much less certain process. We were inspired by the growing conversation around unemployment and underemployment among young, educated professionals and wanted to make that problem easier to understand beyond just statistics.

What it does

No Cap After The Cap is an interactive, data-driven experience that explores what happens after college graduation. Users move through a visual story about employment, underemployment, education, and the gap between the skills graduates have and the opportunities available to them.

Rather than presenting users with a dense dashboard, we turn the data into a simple experience that encourages people to think about what a degree actually guarantees in today's job market.

How we built it

We built the project as a web application using Angular for the frontend. We designed the experience around short, scroll-based sections so that each screen communicates one idea at a time instead of overwhelming the user with information.

We collected and processed data related to graduates, employment, and underemployment, then translated those findings into visualizations and interactive elements that could be understood without a background in statistics.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was working with incomplete and inconsistent data. Some of the datasets did not contain all the variables or coverage we needed to tell a reliable story about graduate employment and underemployment. To address this, we had to supplement our primary data with external sources, compare definitions across datasets, and cross-check statistics before using them in the project. This made the data-cleaning and validation process much more important than we initially expected.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to turn a large and complicated issue into an experience that feels approachable. Instead of building another traditional statistics dashboard, we focused on storytelling and interaction.

We are also proud of creating a design where the data supports the story rather than becoming the entire story.

What we learned

We learned that employment statistics can look very different depending on what you choose to measure. Looking only at whether someone has a job can hide important differences between employment and employment that actually matches someone's education and skills.

We also learned how much design affects the way people interpret data. Choosing what to show, what to leave out, and how to introduce each statistic became just as important as the technical implementation.

What's next for No Cap After The Cap: The Truth After Graduation

Next, we want to expand the project with more graduate outcomes, occupations, majors, and demographic comparisons. We also want to make the experience more personalized so users can explore how different educational and career paths compare.

Long term, we envision No Cap After The Cap as a tool that helps students understand the realities of the post-graduation job market before they have to navigate it themselves.

Built With

• angular.js
• css
• fastapi
• html
• javascript
• numpy
• pandas
• python
• scikit-learn
• shap
• uvicorn