Question

• Do high college costs mean high pay-off in future earnings?

• What about other factors?

  • percentage of STEM majors
  • diversity

Data

Accessed via Kaggle.com. Four files from two sources:

• Diversity by college/university for 2014, from the Chronicle of Higher Education (4575 unique values)

• Tuition and fees by college/university for 2018-2019, from the Chronicle of Higher Education (2 datasets) (2938 and 3664 unique values)

• Salary potential data comes, from payscale.com (934 unique values)

Variables

• Costs
  • in_state_total
  • out_of_state_total
• Expected Earnings
  • early_career_pay
  • mid_career_pay
• Others
  • stem_percent
  • pct_women
  • pct_minority

Weaknesses

• Different time periods.

• Not whole population.

• Many NA values.

Cleaning

1. Starting with diversity data
   • Selected university name, state, and total enrollment variables
   • Pivoted wider by name and state to get counts for different student demographics
2. Joined salary potential data with newly pivoted diversity data based on university name and state
3. Jointed tuition cost data to new data frame
4. Cleaned second tuition cost data and joined to new data frame
   • Pivoted wider to get cost breakdown by income level
   • Joined with new data frame by name and state
   • Ultimately did not use this data in the analysis
5. Removed NAs as appropriate for individual plots
6. Calculated percentages, geographic regions, and other minor variable changes as necessary for individual plots

Costs

Expected Earnings

Scatter Plots

Conclusion

• Some of the more expensive private universities show higher career earnings, but for many this is not the case

• Public universities show a more positive and linear relationship between costs and future earnings

• Strong positive relationship between % STEM and future earnings

• Universities with highest future earnings have a roughly balanced gender mix

• Male-dominated schools tend to be technical universities with higher future earnings compared to female-dominated schools