Research question

Which college majors provide the highest return on investment?

Cases

There are 174 cases, each of which represents a college major.

Data collection

The original data was collected by the U.S. Census Bureau as part of the 2010-2012 American Community Survey (ACS). FiveThirtyEight (https://fivethirtyeight.com) used this data to construct a new dataset that acted as the factual foundation for their “The Economic Guide To Picking A College Major” (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-economic-guide-to-picking-a-college-major) story. This data project will utilize FiveThirtyEight’s version of the data.

Type of study

This is an observational study examing college majors and their relation to employment and earnings.

Data Source

The dataset was created byFiveThirtyEight and can be found here - https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data/blob/master/college-majors/all-ages.csv. The set was constructed with data from the “American Community Survey 2010-2012 Public Use Microdata Series” (https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/data/pums.html).

Dependent Variable

What is the response variable? Is it quantitative or qualitative?

The response variable in this analysis is the qualitative variable “Major_category”.

Independent Variable

The independent variables in this analysis are “Major_category”, which is qualitative, and “Median”, which is quantitative.

Relevant summary statistics

Data Sample

library(knitr)
library(kableExtra)

csv = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fivethirtyeight/data/master/college-majors/all-ages.csv"
college_majors <- read.csv(file = csv, header = TRUE)

head(college_majors) %>% kable() %>% kable_styling(bootstrap_options = c('striped', 'bordered')) %>%
row_spec(1:6, color = "black")
Major_code Major Major_category Total Employed Employed_full_time_year_round Unemployed Unemployment_rate Median P25th P75th
1100 GENERAL AGRICULTURE Agriculture & Natural Resources 128148 90245 74078 2423 0.0261471 50000 34000 80000
1101 AGRICULTURE PRODUCTION AND MANAGEMENT Agriculture & Natural Resources 95326 76865 64240 2266 0.0286361 54000 36000 80000
1102 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS Agriculture & Natural Resources 33955 26321 22810 821 0.0302483 63000 40000 98000
1103 ANIMAL SCIENCES Agriculture & Natural Resources 103549 81177 64937 3619 0.0426789 46000 30000 72000
1104 FOOD SCIENCE Agriculture & Natural Resources 24280 17281 12722 894 0.0491884 62000 38500 90000
1105 PLANT SCIENCE AND AGRONOMY Agriculture & Natural Resources 79409 63043 51077 2070 0.0317909 50000 35000 75000