Background

Firstly, the 'help-you-choose-your-school' sites. There were a few of these, and they all used the data from Payscale. I've shown my favorite one on the right. Its quite pretty.

Looking into displaying data on maps in general, plots like this were obviously the most common. When I mentioned that one way to display 1D data on a 2D map - this is it. I specifically didn't want to end up with something like this.

Feeling quite disappointed, I went looking for more interesting variations of hte above. I came across and was pleasantly surprised by some of the maps. There were a few which incorpotated a time dimension (e.g. this one), which I found interesting, but my data only went back a few years (to 2013), so I moved on.

I then found the graph on the right. I was intrigued. They managed to use a map projection in a useful way, without reverting back to what I didn't want. They grouped data along sections of longitude, and then one again by latitude. There was also a time component, but the graph was interesting enough even without that.