Introduction

I chose a data set from Kaggle.com titled International Education Costs posted by Adil Shamim. It lists program costs from universities around the world and includes tuition, rent, visa fees, and insurance for master’s programs across 100 different universities. I wanted to analyze the overall financial burden on international students and whether tuition plays the biggest role or not. This data set gives a good view of how costs vary by country and program. My analysis uses the first 100 rows of the data set and uses R to examine the relationships between cost factors. I specially chose this topic since I have many friends who are either exchange students or international students and I personally have studied abroad and know firsthand how expensive international education is.

Link to Data: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/adilshamim8/cost-of-international-education

## 
## Call:
## lm(formula = Total_Estimated_Cost ~ Tuition_USD, data = df)
## 
## Residuals:
##    Min     1Q Median     3Q    Max 
## -40913 -14324  -1284  11124  67232 
## 
## Coefficients:
##              Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
## (Intercept) 2.784e+04  3.156e+03   8.821 4.36e-14 ***
## Tuition_USD 1.823e+00  1.181e-01  15.435  < 2e-16 ***
## ---
## Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1
## 
## Residual standard error: 21130 on 98 degrees of freedom
## Multiple R-squared:  0.7085, Adjusted R-squared:  0.7056 
## F-statistic: 238.2 on 1 and 98 DF,  p-value: < 2.2e-16

Interpretation, Findings and Conclusions

My analysis showed a strong positive relationship between tuition fees and total education cost for international students. The R-squared value was about 0.71, which shows that 71% of the variation in total cost is explained by tuition alone. The slope coefficient for tuition was 1.82, meaning that for every additional $1,000 in tuition, the total cost increases by about $1,820 when considering rent, visa, and insurance. This shows that tuition is a major factor but other expenses still play a big role. This information could be helpful in showing that affordability for international education should consider factors other than tuition alone. Many international students are comparing total out-of-pocket cost, not just tuition. If schools were to include the total out-of-pocket expense as an estimate for future students, they would get more applications. An example of a great way to show this is on California State University, Bakersfield’s Study Abroad page. They list different schools along with a specific budget estimate on each page. ( See “Sample Budget Sheet (exact Expenses Amount Will Vary)” at https://www.csub.edu/studyabroad/)

References

Dataset Source Adil Shamim, D. (2022). International Education Costs Dataset. Retrieved from Kaggle

Tutorials & Technical Guides UT JimmyX. (n.d.). Tutorial – Using ChatGPT for a Basic Simple Regression Analysis. RPubs. https://rpubs.com/utjimmyx/chatgptAI

Others ChatGPT for regression analysis