Introduction
You are back at it again as a quantitative analyst! This time a small college, Southwest College (SWC) has hired you to make sense of some data they have collected. The administrators have a lot of experience in education but precious little in data analysis. They have hired you to help them understand their data and make sound decisions.
SWC has provided you with as much information as they have, and it is up to you to determine the best quantitative approach to answering their questions. SWC has also made it clear that it is crucial that you explain what you are doing in a way such that a group of people unfamiliar with quantitative analysis can understand what you are doing and feel comfortable with the results. If you just provide a numerical answer to their questions, while still helpful, this will not meet their expectations for the project.
Deliverable
SWC has requested that you answer their questions in the form of a business report in MS Word format. Simply typing in answers to their questions below will be construed as a lack of professionalism. The writing must be free of errors and easy to understand. The exact design of the report is up to you, as long as the report format is used correctly and professionally, and all issues are addressed in an organized and coherent manner. You are to include any equations and calculations that you have done to be completely transparent. Any graphs or diagrams should be included in the body of the report or in an appendix.
THE CASE
The provost at SWC, based on anecdotal evidence, is convinced that the student-faculty ratio (# of students divided by the number of faculty) is an important determinant of student success after graduation. The university president believes the overall prestige of the university is a bigger factor, and other administrators believe it is largely the academic quality of the students admitted that matters most. SWC has purchased some data that shows students’ starting salaries along with various characteristics of the universities the students attended. SWC wants to know if you can determine how the student starting salaries are related to the following variables in the data set: the per semester cost of attendance, the region of the country in which the school is located, the student-faculty ratio, average high school GPA of students admitted, the size of the school’s library, and the school’s national rank. Specifically, the administrators want answers to the following questions:
· What is the appropriate quantitative technique to determine how the variables are related?
· Which variables are important determinants of starting salaries? Be sure to explain how you are arriving at this conclusion.
· What strategy would you recommend for improving the starting salaries of SWC graduates?
In addition to the questions above, SWC has requested a data visualization component in the report. You are to use multiple diagrams and appropriately formatted charts following the principles you learned in this course to help illustrate key findings.