The aim of this project is to find out which are the most relevant features that students consider to choose the preferred American university. Some of the essential questions for developing this project are related to the number of applications, admissions, and enrollments, cost of tuition and fees, cost of living on campus, types of degrees offered, and features of the states where universities are located (population and GDP).
The dataset used for this analysis was taken from https://www.kaggle.com/sumithbhongale/american-university-data-ipeds-dataset. Although this dataset does not contain information about all the first-ranked American universities, the patterns and insights extracted from it are highly representative of the whole behavior. The dataset contains more than a thousand rows (universities) and 145 columns (features about those universities). Several of those features are out of the scope of this project. Only the features that have information to answer the questions to achieve the goal of the project were deployed. The most powerful tools for data analysis used in this project are the packages Numpy and Pandas, and to visualize and explore the data: Matplotlib and Seaborn.
When I needed help at certain points, I took help from Jovian.AI notebooks.
The hypotheses and questions generated to develop this projects are:
- Do universities with a high number of applications are the preferred ones by students?; in other words, could the number of applications tell us that a university is one of the most preferred by students?.
- Do students prefer universities that have a high rate of admission?, in other words, do students prefer a university where it is easier for them to be admitted?.
- Do students prefere public or private universities?
- Do students prefer universities with low tuition and fees?
- Do students prefer a university for its low on-campus cost of living?
- Do students prefer universities from highly populated states?
- Do students prefer a university because it belongs to a state with a high GDP per capita?
- Do students prefer a university based on the possibility of a higher, additional academic degree in the same university?