Last January, when I came back from the United States, I was eager to start my first CAR project.
As an education reporter, I decided that the project should be about education. Another quickly made decision was that the project had to be about universities, because there are only 13 in the whole country. If necessary, 13 records could be imported by hand. And calculations with 13 columns could be checked with an old-fashioned calculator. I felt safe, knowing I could defeat bad luck, such as data that didn't want to be imported into my spreadsheet, or other dirty tricks software plays on clumsy beginners.
Finding the data
Each year, the Dutch education department publishes a book with data about universities. I looked it through and found three uncomplicated tables with information about the staff at every university, including how many employees have temporary contracts, how many have steady ones, the number of employees in the distinctive job levels - that kind of stuff.
These tables were potentially interesting because of political circumstances. At a national level, it was decided that the universities had to become more autonomous in their staff policy. And the university boards had to cut expenses. I wondered whether the universities could shrink without mass layoffs. I also wanted to know what kind of employment policy they had four years ago, when they also had to cut expenses.
My colleagues at the education desk agreed that these questions were worthwhile, so I started the project. I asked the information official at the department of education to send me the book with the university data on floppy disk. The older data I found in another book. These were not available in an electronic version, so I had to type those in.
Hitting paydirt
When the floppy arrived, the data appeared to be in WP 6.1 format. As there is no Windows-PC at the newsroom, I had to work at home, where I have installed Microsoft's Office Professional. I translated the data into Word, which was a piece of cake. And it turned out Excel had no problems with the tables. I was stunned about my luck and the intelligence of Excel.
I analyzed the employees' records of public universities with Excel and found the number of professors, who get the highest salaries, had been increasing, while the total number of teachers had been declining. I also found that this had nothing to do with selective layoffs. The boards had ignorantly hired more professors. So, while the boards were trying to deal with lack of money, they were spending an increasing amount of money on salaries.
I visited three universities to find explanations for the data. I knew which university faced mass layoffs. And I found universities that had cut expenses by using Ph.D. students as teachers, which is only allowed on a small scale.
Three weeks and counting
The project took three weeks. My colleagues found this ridiculously long and were pressing me to publish during the last two weeks. At Dutch newspapers, working three days on one story is considered long.
The stories were hard to read, because they mainly explained the data; I had no time to do some reporting. Nevertheless I'm satisfied. The project was a little CAR example in Dutch, which I needed to show the newsroom what CAR is capable of. The management of Trouw appears to be interested. There is a lack of money, but hopefully, by the end of this year, there will be a Windows-PC in the newsroom.
Marjan Agerbeek can be reached by e-mail at agerbeek@knoware.nl