28. In Conclusion Differences Flagler College is very different from the schools we studied in the west. Flagler’s acceptance rate, alumni giving, tuition, number of Freshmen in the top 25% of their high school class, and rate of females to males are all significantly different from most of the Schools in the West.
29. In Conclusion Similarities However, there were a few similarities. All of the schools, except for one, were at least close to Flagler in size. We also found that Flagler was similar in the fact that there are more females than males enrolled in most of the colleges.
Editor's Notes
These are just the general statistics for all variables for the Colleges and Universities in the West that we Studied.
One of the Variable’s we found interesting was the size of the undergraduate enrollment. We found this one Interesting because of the extreme outlier that we have for this graph. As you can see, there is one school that has significantly more times the number of average colleges. This school is called Northwestern University and it has 19,005 students enrolled at the college.
As you can see, when we take out this very large outlier, the graph is much different. The significant outlier here only has 4461 students, and this is the United States Air Force Academy.
Another one of the variables we found interesting was the ratio of Female Students to male students. There is a significant outlier here for Northwestern University. It has way more male and female students enrolled because it has more students enrolled in general. This is because it is more of a university than a small college.
However, without the extreme outlier, The amount of male and female students for colleges in the west drops dramatically. Without the outlier, it is 823 male students and 841 female students. This means that Flagler College has 172 more male students than the average and 701 more females than the average. This means that compared to the average college in the west, Flagler has a very high female to male ratio. In fact, only one college had a higher proportion. That college is Schriener College and they have 67% female students compared to Flagler College’s 64%
The Math and Critical Reading Scores are taken from the 75% percentile of schools. For the average College in the West, the average Math SAT Score is 556, while the average Critical Reading Score is 553. The average SAT Scores in the West for both Math and Critical Reading are lower than Flagler’s. Flagler’s 75th percentile Math SAT Score is 580 and the 75th percentile Critical Reading Score is 580.
This means that Flagler has a 24 point higher average than the rest of the schools in the West. Since the difference between the SAT scores is so small, we can say Flagler has a very similar Math SAT score when compared to school in the West.
The difference between average SAT critical reading scores for Flagler and for the Colleges in the West also varies only slightly. As you can see, Flagler’s data falls right with the mode and median of the rest of the data.
Flagler College had roughly the same number of majors and minors as the other schools in the west. Some schools however, had way more and some had way less. The California Maritime academy had only 8 majors and 7 minors compared to the 20 majors and 28 minors at Flagler College.
When compared to the average number of majors for western colleges, Flagler is significantly below the average. The average is 31 majors and Flagler only has 20 majors. However, when comparing the number of minors Flagler is slightly above that average. Schools in the west averaged 22 minors while Flagler has 28. Flagler is unusual in the way that its one of the only schools that actually has more minors than majors. The only other school is East Texas Baptist with 44 majors and 46 minors.
In comparison to the average school of the West, Flagler College has a smaller percentage of classes with less than 20 students. The average for schools in the West has a percentage of 65, while Flagler has only a percentage of 37. So Flagler has roughly half the number of classes with 20 students or less when compared to the west. Flagler also has smaller percentage of classes with 50 students or more. The Average for the west is 1.8% and Flagler has 0% of classes with 50 students or more.
As you can tell from the graph there seems to be a slight positive correlation between yearly tuition and percentage of students receiving aid. The correlation coefficient, r, is 0.3559 which means there is not a very strong correlation but that there still is one. In a few instances, the number of students receiving aid is caused by the tuition cost. For example, the United States Air Force Academy has zero percent of students receiving aid. However, the yearly tuition for students in the Air Force is $0.00, so it would not make sense to give institutional grants to someone when they will not be paying anything for college.
For this statistic we found that there was as very slight negative correlation. The correlation coefficient is -0.3037 which is not a very strong correlation. We don’t think there can be a cause effect relationship, at least for the schools in the west, between average alumni giving and undergraduate enrollment.
For this Statistic, there is a fairly strong correlation. The correlation coefficient is 0.4402 which, like we said, is a fairly strong correlation. For this statistic, you can say there is cause and effect between the two variables. The higher the amount of tuition, the more likely the average amount of aid the institution grants will go up.
For this comparison, there is a very strong correlation. The correlation coefficient is 0.7099 which means there is a very strong positive relation in the data. This data could suggest that the reason the graduation rate is so high is due to the high retention rate. This could be true because if there is a high retention rate, that probably means that the students like the school, and if the students like the school they might want to work harder to graduate from it.
This data shows that we are 95% confident that all of the schools have a General Education Requirement between 37 and 48 hours. It also shows that the mean number of required hours is 42.6. This is strange because Flagler College’s required General Education hours is only 33. That means Flagler College, in comparison to the other colleges has a very unusually low amount of General Education hours. We figure that this could be because of two things: Perhaps because Flagler puts a greater emphasis on courses that go towards a major, or because some of the schools were extreme outliers and therefore changed the averages and limits. For Example, the U.S. Air force Academy has 96 hours of general education. More that twice the average mean.
In this Confidence Interval, we found that we were 95% confident that the average school of the West has somewhere between 34 and 46% of students in the top 25% of their class. When you compare this to Flagler College, Flagler College is again very unusual. Flagler College has 50% of its freshmen in the top 25% of their high school class. This is very high compared to the rest of the schools and does not even fall in between the lower limit and the upper limit. It is also 10% higher than the average mean. This may be due to the fact that Flagler College’s acceptance rate is so low. Most of the kids at this school had to be in the top 25% to even think about getting accepted here, which might explain why half the Flagler freshmen class came from the top 25% of their class.
The information we found in the confidence interval for the acceptance rate of colleges was very interesting. We found that we were 95% confident that the average college in the West has an acceptance rate between 65 and 78. When we compare Flagler College to this confidence interval, we were shocked to find that Flagler College’s acceptance rate (26%) is about one third of the lower limit for the average school in the west. We think this is due to the fact that Flagler College has very high expectations for the students it accepts and therefore has a lower acceptance rate. This may also be because Flagler College gets a large amount of applications, but a very small amount of students they can accept.
In this Confidence interval, we found that we are 95% confident that the percent of alumni who make a donation is roughly between 7 and 11 percent for the schools in the west. When you compare this interval to Flagler College, we once again found that Flagler is very unusual compared to the rest. At 18% of Alumni giving, Flagler is about twice the mean for the sample we obtained which means they are once again not between the lower limit and the upper limit. This could be attributed to the fact that Flagler College graduates students who become successful and decide to donate back to the school because they are so well off. This could also be because the people who graduate from Flagler love the school and want to keep it alive. So they give to the College.
The probability of the percent of faculty being at least 72 is 36.8, fail to reject h0:p=.72h1:p≠.72. So since this data does not lie in the rejection region and we fail to reject the null hypothesis, we cannot say this data holds statistical significance.The probability of the number of semester credit hours of math being at least 6 is 99.92, fail to reject h0:p=6 h1:p<6 So since this data does not lie in the rejection region and we fail to reject the null hypothesis, we cannot say this data holds statistical significance.The probability of the average freshman retention rate being at least 74 is less than 1, reject h0:p=.74 h1:p≠.74 So since the data does lie in the rejection region and we reject the null hypothesis, we can say this data holds statistical significance.The probability of the average graduation rate being at least 55 is less than 1, reject h0:p=.55 h1:p≠.55 So since the data does lie in the rejection region and we reject the null hypothesis, we can say this data holds statistical significance.
The correlation between these two variables is a very powerful positive one. The correlation coefficient for this statistic is 0.8261, indicating that there is a relationship between SAT math scores and the number of required math general education course. We can say that there is a cause-effect relationship between these two variables because if a school has lots of math general education courses, it might be a school that specializes in something like engineering. That would mean that people who are interesting in it, would probably be people who did very well on their math SAT.
When we studied the relationship between full time faculty and the average graduation rate, we found essentially no correlation. The correlation coefficient is only 0.0196 which means it is little to no correlation at all. Since there is little to no correlation, we can conclude that there is no cause-effect realtionship. We found this strange because we would expect the amount of full time faculty members to increase the graduation rate of students.
However, there were a few similarities. All of the schools, except for one, were at least close to Flagler in size, and that the SAT scores for both math and reading were very similar. We also found that Flagler was similar in the fact that there are more females than males enrolled in most of the colleges. Flagler does have a much higher female to male ratio than most schools, but the fact that most of the schools have more females than males enrolled shows a similarity. So there were a few similarities between some of the colleges and Flagler, however Flagler differed from the schools on more levels than they were similar. We think this is because the Western part of the United States is so different in general, when compared to a place like St. Augustine, Florida.