Calculations on out of state commuting, and international student air miles

Matt - That is amazing. Good job!

RE: out of state students:
For states adjacent to Ohio, I think it is fair to assume these student will be driving back and forth. I would pick a major/central city in each state and estimate drive miles * the number of students from that state. Then apply the same assumption (4 trips home/year)

eg INDIANA = RT Indianapolis miles to Athens* 4*# of students from IN
PENN = RT Pittsburgh miles to Athens* 4* # students from PA
KY = RT Lexington miles to Athens* 4* # students from KY

RE: Foreign students.
My gut feeling here is that these international student numbers should be given to Samantha Williams from our class (sw223407@ohiou.edu). I am cc-ing her here.

We have a lot of students from Africa, East Asia, India [in addition to a lot of other places]. For many of these students - they come here and *might* be able to visit home once or twice during the course of their studies.

What I would recommend is to estimate that each international student will fly the equivalent of a RT to Paris every year. That will over estimate for some, and wildly underestimate for others (China, Japan, African continent, etc). It's a start.

Using this URL = http://www.webflyer.com/travel/milemarker/
. . . ROUND TRIP Air Miles . . .
CMH - JFK = 962 miles (1548 km)
JFK = CDG (Paris) = 8060 miles (12980 km)

So these data would be plugged into the student air travel part of the Carbon Campus Calculator (via Samantha's section).

Just to be consistent I am going to paste this email into the blog, so that we can have a record of this collaboration.

--KJB

Quoting ma236805@ohio.edu:

> Hi Dr. Brown,
>
> I got the In-state stuff typed into a spreadsheet and calculated the
> distance that everyone(from Ohio) travels to get here based on 4 trips back
> and forth each year. I used GIS to estimate distance from the center of each
> county. The total came out to be over 16,000,000 miles!And that doesn't even
> count the 3,000 out-of-state and foreign students. Any ideas on how / if I should do
> those? The 1056 foreign students will be especially difficult because they're
> home countries are not given in this info.
>
> Thanks again for your help getting this info. It isn't what I had in
> mind when I volunteered to do the commuter mileage, but you were right, it is
> better than nothing.
>
> -Matt

Kim J. Brown, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
[ecophysiology & ecosystem function]
Dept. of Environmental and Plant Biology
Ohio University, Athens OH 45701

Lab = http://ecophys.plantbio.ohiou.edu/index.html
Dept = http://www.plantbio.ohiou.edu

Dr. Brown's work this week on Commuter data

This week I was doing some work to assist Matt Alden in his project - estimating how many miles commuted by faculty/students/staff.

Matt's first (and most direct attempt) was to obtain records from Transportation services as to who has parking hang tags - this seemed to be the most direct way of learning who is driving to campus. Those data are only available as hardcopy data - about 18,000 pieces of paper - that no one has time to type in manually.

The next step was Matt talking to someone in Institutional Research to track down zip codes associated with each faculty/staff person. The idea was that Matt would use zip code data to estimate driving distance. They told Matt they don't have zip code data.

Wed 31 Oct I visited the Institutional Research office and they provided data from the OU factbook that has a distribution of #s of students from each county of Ohio. In addition there is a list of # of students from the other 49 states, as well as a tally of international students.

Fri 2 Nov I visited Carlotta Hensler (hensler@ohio.edu) in the Human Resources office to ask for fac/staff zip code data by year. She agreed that it would be a simple request and that these data would be provided by the HR analyst Steve Madden (maddens@ohio.edu).
These data should be emailed on Monday 5 Nov. --KJB

Commuter / Faculty Parking Permit Data

This afternoon I spoke with Serena McCollum at the Office of Institutional Research about my project and the problems I was having obtaining electronic data. She said that they had no way of creating such a spreadsheet. While they do have a database with student names and addresses, they had no way of telling if they commute or if they live at an Athens residence.

Faculty / Commuter Permits...

This morning I was contacted by Teresa at Parking Services about my request for commuter and faculty parking permits. They have records from the previous three years only, because they are not required to keep them for more than three years. Furthermore, the only available records of the addresses to which the permits were issued are on individual sales receipts and not in any electronic form. I went down to the Parking Services office to go through the permits. However, there are roughly 3,000 commuter permits and 2,500-3,400 faculty permits for each year. This figure includes permits that are given as replacements for ones that are lost or stolen. I'm not entirely sure about where to go from here. I am considering going through a portion of the permits to get a sample of the data, but I'm not sure how many would represent an adequate sample.

Requesting Commuter Records

Hi,

I was the male with brown hair who was at parking services earlier this week. I was looking for commuter permit records and I was the recipient of about six raised eyebrows, as I had anticipated. I went to Pilcher House on Tuesday and submitted a request for the records. I am currently waiting to hear back from Legal Affairs.

Data should be based on fiscal years

This is just a note to say that according to Jennifer Schroeder, program officer and webmaster for Clean Air-Cool Planet, the majority of colleges collect data based on fiscal years. I am posting this as a separate post because I think it is relevant to categories for which information included in previous posts about this issue is not.

This post is to establish post labels.