Analysis of College Ratings and Reviews
Matthew Niederjohn
Explanation
The Niche website provides a rankings of universities in the United States. These rankings involve information about colleges such as their acceptance rate, test scores and cost of admission. The collection of this data allows for various studies about colleges in America to be conducted.
Several interesting questions can be asked about this data and how it can be used for further analysis. A list of questions that I sought to answer are listed below:
- Do colleges with a higher number of reviews have lower acceptance rates?
- Would it be true to say that universities with the highest admission cost are the ones with the highest ratings?
- Are higher rated universities the ones with the lowest acceptance rates?
Data Summary and Dictionary
Niche provides ratings and review data for each school in their rankings. For this project, I gathered the following pieces of information from the Niche website: school name, school location, number of reviews for the school, school rating, acceptance rate, cost of admission, and SAT score range.
Data Dictionary
Variables included in the data and a description of them:
- College Name: The title of each university
- College Location: The city and state in which the school is located in
- Number of Reviews: The total number of times that school has been reviewed on Niche’s website
- College Rating: The average rating score for each school based off of user reviews
- College Review: The user review of the school that is highlighted on the home page of each school. Is designated by what year in school the reviewer is.
- Acceptance Rate: The percentage right at which each school admits students who apply to the university
- SAT Range: The average range of test scores from admitted students into each university.
- Net Price: The average price that each student pays to attend the school
Data Frame Collection
While collecting the data, there was a slight error in scraping the ensuing from Niche. This resulted in the identical reviews being copied four times over, resulting in four instances of 25 colleges and their review information.
However, I was able to compile the existing data into a data frame, linked below:
Analysis
Distribution of schools ranked in the top 25 by Niche based on their acceptance rate.
Of the top 25 schools in Niche’s rankings, 19 colleges have an acceptance rate that is 10% of lower. This supports the claim that the highest ranked schools tend to be the ones that are most selective in terms of admission rate.
Breakdown of College Rating Based on Acceptance Rates
It is clear that schools with lower acceptance rates experience higher ratings. On average, colleges with an acceptance rate of 5% or lower has a rating above 4/5. Interestingly, however, the colleges in this data that had an acceptance rate between 10-15% were actually higher rated that more selective schools listed between 5-10% acceptance rate.
Distribution of top ranked schools based on their Niche rating
This distribution helps to better understand how highly each of the schools in Niche’s top 25 are rated. Interestingly, of their top schools, no college is ranked higher than 4.2/5. Additionally, of the 25 universities, 11 of them have a rating that is lower than 4/5.
Comparison of College Rating based on Net Admission Price
This bar graph provides a comparison of average rating on Niche for colleges based on their admission price range. The visual seems to support the trend that more expensive schools are higher rated. However, it is interesting to note that colleges 10-20K range are higher rated on average than those in the 20-30k range.
Conclusion
Overall, the Niche college rankings data proved to be difficult to scrape. There were many challenges faced in both making all of the data numeric as well scraping enough data off of multiple pages. Being able to better achieve both of those requests would allow for a better and more complete analysis of the data and make better predictions on the data.