EPS Market Map in R

There are a few minor tweaks renaming on this map before it is complete, but I wanted to share the EPS Market Map I put together.  It can be downloaded using this link.

This file is meant to be used with R and divides the lower 48 states into the CollegeBoard’s Enrollment Planning Service markets. To build the territories, I used the crosswalk file provided on the EPS search site (in the appendix) and ‘dissolved’ the zip codes into markets. Help on how I performed this task can be found here and here.

As you will see below, there are still a few gaps in the map that I need to fill in.  Ideally, the Collegeboard would have provided the necessary GIS files to us, but currently that is not an option.

My end game is to use this file to geocode Lat/Long data to EPS territories in addition to basic choropleth mapping for enrollment planning.  If you want to contribute to this project, please don’t hesitate to reach out!

The Rdata file currently includes 3 objects.  This will change as I finalize the map files.

1. eps.missing which is a data frame of zip codes that still need to be associated with an EPS territory
2. myzip which is a SpatialPolysDataFrame object.  It is the map of the lower 48 by zip code.  To plot, simply use the command plot(myzip) but note it will take a minute or so depending on your machine
3. eps.markets is the working draft of the eps markets map and is the same type as myzip

> plot(eps.markets, col=sample(colors(), 301, replace=T))
> plot(eps.markets, col="red")