MEMORANDUM
To the board of investors,
We are a team working on building the new school proposal for the private sector. Since we are not government aided, we are seeking sponsorship from private investors. The purpose of this presentation is to propose the new school location, how much tuition to increase over time, market research and marketing strategies.
We were able to obtain and analyze a sample dataset of colleges historical tuition, gender diversity and pay range in the U.S at the early career and mid career. Based on our analysis, this plan proposes the new school to be a private four-year institution - statistical data shows a positive relationship between private school graduates and a higher early and mid career salary. At this point, we are focusing on the top 10 states with highest average early career pay.
Figure 1 shows the differences between annual early and mid career pay for private schools in the top 10 states. Among these states, New York and California have the highest early career salary. Most notably, New York has the biggest difference between early and mid career pay, which indicates a promising growth potential in salary.
We proceed to analyze further into these top states with high salary. The data showed an interesting pattern where states with high early and mid career pay also showed a high percentage of STEM degree enrollment. In addition, California and New York has the highest growth between early and mid career pay. Our research also shows the majority of graduates from these two states majored in a STEM-related degree.
According to figure 2, top 5 states with the highest percentage of students in STEM are New York, California, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming. Among these states, evidently, four out of five matches the top pay states from figure 1. This, again, confirms our prior statement that there is a positive relationship between states with a high percentage of students enrolled in STEM and states with high paying salary.
Based on the first figure, New York has a good potential for a new school. This high early paid and fast growth potential is very attractive for our future students. At the same time, our elite private school is looking to recruit students who are interested in majoring in a STEM-related degree, which again leads to New York (based on figure 2).
Our next task for market research as a new business leads us to take a further look into the competitors in the New York area.
This table provides a list of 4-year private university competitors in the New York market and useful information for our initial decision-making process. One of those important initial decisions a new university has to make is tuition rate. We take pride in offering a fair and equal tuition range for all prospect students. We observed that Colgate University has the highest tuition averages 55870 annually and Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences has the lowest tuition averages 35105 annually.
Our next task is to review and understand the historical tuition for four-year private universities. Being able to examine this data is very useful for our institution to decide on an appropriate range of tuition increase. We also limited our data to the most recent 3 years data so that the tuition rate largely reflect the most up-to-date cost of living and inflation. Based on the above line graph, on average, there is a 3.14% change observed annually for four-year private universities.
In the modern world, science and technology play essential parts of our life. Therefore, our school decided to offer degrees specifically in Technology, Science and Engineering. Furthermore, another important matter we are trying to solve is marketing - which demographic of potential students should we target? Thorough analysis reveals a large percentage of students who enrolled in these fields being men. Therefore, we proceed to evaluate the top majors of recent male graduates.
Above are the trending degrees of the recent male graduates. In addition, new graduates with these majors are getting a higher early career pay than most. From a profit perspective, the school has decided to offer several majors within these high-early-career-pay majors. To be specific, Petroleum Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering and Construction services are offered for our incoming students. In the future, the school’s expansion plan will involve adding more majors into the Technology, Science and Engineering branch. At the same time, our future plan also entail creating new departments which contains STEM majors within medical and business schools.
Key Take-aways
Based on our analysis, to fulfill our profit objective, we propose the new private four-year institution to be built in New York. The institution would focus heavily on technology, science and engineering field, with the main targeted market as “male” group.The initial plan for tuition is an average 3% increase annually, to be re-reviewed every year with the change in inflation. This initial proposal is only preliminary and is based on a single source of data. If the board of investor is interested in this plan, we can proceed to perform a more thorough and detailed analysis.We would appreciate to hear back from you before Fall 2022 school year so we can take further action.
Thank you for your time and review