Blog

Tuition data for 16 Michigan universities

The school tuition data provided information regarding the cost of attending public universities in Michigan. The data was organized in an excel sheet, and it showed the cost of tuition and fee, books and supplies, room and board, transportation, MISC expenses, and the district total of sixteen universities of Michigan. 

This data presented general information, and it wasn’t specific regarding if the cost was applied for full time or part time students. Also, the provided data is from 2011-2012, and when I looked at this data, I was interested to know how different is the data for the year of 2016-1017 compared to this data.

The data showed attending costs of sixteen universities in Michigan. Even though the average cost of most of the sixteen universities is between $20,000 and $22,000. However, there is a big difference in cost between the university with the highest cost and the university with the lowest cost.

The university of Michigan Dearborn has the lowest total district cost of $15,419.36, where the Kendall college of art and design of Ferris state university has the highest district cost of $26,858. I was surprised to find out that the university of Michigan has the lowest district total cost and that led me to have a series of questions. First, is the difference in total cost related to the education quality? Second, what data should I look for to determine education quality in both the universities with the highest and lowest total cost rate? I decided to look at graduation rates and student employment numbers after graduation for both universities.

Comparing school tuition data

There were many things that I found interesting in the comparative report while doing the school tuition data exercise. Before I started college in 2013 I haven’t looked into college’s tuition cost and ratings. I just wanted to go to a 4-year university that was close to home. Now five years later I now know how important it is to look into the college you want to go to and compare it to others.

Looking at the comparison chart, I noticed there were quite a bit differences between the 4-year colleges in Michigan that I personally did not know about. I noticed how there is a big tuition difference between Kendal College of Art and Design of Ferris State University and Saginaw Valley State University. Kendal College of Art and Design’s tuition and fees cost about $15,000 and Saginaw cost about $8,000 that’s about a 50% difference and I found that to be very surprising.  I never knew before looking at this data chart what a big difference the cost of college would be. I have always assumed four-year Universities would be near the same price.

Something else I noticed on the data chart was Northern Michigan University full-time students get a ThinkPad notebook. That is very reasonable for a student paying about $8,000 in tuitions. I personally think that is a good idea when paying so much for tuitions, some students might not have that extra money to buy any electronics for school because tuition rates are very high.

Comparing schools on a chart like this made me realize how important it is compared colleges before choosing the right one. From now on I would advise any highs school students that have questions about the college to look into something like this.

A world of pirates

The data set that I believe will be captivating is most popular illegal  downloads based on a four day data capture by The Guardian. Although this article only writes about popular Christmas movie downloads, having this data readily available has me wondering about a couple different scenarios.

How many people download and or illegally stream movies premiering in theaters, television shows etc. Also, how many people do not have cable service or video streaming services like Hulu or Netflix?

This type of data set would prove helpful in writing a blog piece on this subject due to its analysis of the term “popular” and transitioning that to what actually is popular. For example, the premier of “Game of Thrones” may have had 10 million views through a sanctioned cable provider, we have people who use piracy sites to view them as well.

The article specifies the type of movies that were downloaded, timeframe of when data was collected, and the software used to collect the data. The article certainly raise the question: Are we living in a world of modern pirates?

 

Quartz data, data we can believe

Quartz is a popular outlet for the data that it shares. While looking on different social media outlets for this news station I came across an interesting Twitter feed where they published data on unemployment (see screenshots) .

In this feed Quartz mentions how Trump boasted about having the African American unemployment rate down in just one year. On the surface this seems like wonderful news, especially for the economy.

Quartz uses its twitter to pull data from reliable sources to back the publication that is being tweeted, which is more than what some folks do! For example, for this article Quartz pulled the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In its twitter feed Quartz have also included the incarceration number among African American women and men, and if those numbers where counted this 6.7% statistic would be higher. I also liked how Quartz has included the differences in numbers between non black employment and incarceration. There is a wealth of difference.

Unemployment difference between white and black Trumps tweet on Black unemployment

After viewing there twitter feed and the data they show. It’s safe to assume they have the backing for their claims. It is great to see a news outlet that links data without being biased. One could tell they are considering “The Elements of Journalism.” And that dear reader is a bullseye in the realm of news and data. Until next time.

~ Z

Surprising cost of colleges in Michigan

So, as many of you know we recently had to do data analysis of the cost of certain colleges in Michigan. It came as a great surprise to me that the most expensive public four year college is not The University of Michigan. Because my family is a Michigan family I alway heard stories of the cost of attendance for Michigan, so I blindly assumed that The University of Michigan was the most expensive. But its not!

tuition

Some off-shoot of Ferris State is actually the most expensive school to attend. Looking at the cost per credit hour and the ridiculous requirement of owning a MacBook Pro it is not that surprising that Kendal College passes The University of Michigan. Other than Kendal beating out Michigan the rest of the table has nothing up its sleves. Michigan beats Michigan Tech and Michigan State, and they beat other smaller schools like Western and Central.