Tiffany Rodriguez

Math 1040, Term Project

Thursday April 30, 2015

Math 1040 Term Project

Starting Compensation for College Graduates

Major Field
Sample
Mean
Sample
Std. Dev.

Computer

ications

Science

54537

46227

59541

40021

60664

38817

42842

7232

7214

4670

2365

7879

7146

4654

Business

Education

Engi-

Humanities

Commun-

neering

& Social
Sciences

Math &
Sciences

We were asked to analyze data from the US department of Labor Statistics for
the starting compensations of college graduates. I will be making some Histograms
and a 5-Number Summary as a Box-Plot to show the comparisons of the different
fields of study.

Business
25
20
15
10
Frequency 5
0

18

21
10
Frequency

1
0 0 0

$ Income

0 0

Min: 40745 Q1: 49173

Med: 54729 Q3: 59184

Max: 71803

Communications
28

30
20
Frequency

11

10

0 0

Frequency
0 0 0

$ Income

Min: 33282 Q1: 41609

Med: 45420 Q3: 51185

Max: 62359

Computer Science
30
20
10
Frequency
0

24 24
2

Frequency

0 0 0

0 0 0

$ Income

Min: 46785 Q1: 56864

Med: 59836 Q3: 62478

Max: 69490

Education
27

30

23

20
Frequency

10
0

Frequency
0 0

0 0 0 0 0

$ Income

Min: 35250 Q1: 38690

Med: 39857 Q3: 41638

Max: 44591

Engineering
30
20
10
Frequency
0

21

16

0 0 0

Frequency
0

$ Income

Min: 46475 Q1: 54789

Med: 60042 Q3: 66452

Max: 80236

Humanities & Social Sciences

30

24
16

20
Frequency

10
0

Frequency
0

$ Income

Min: 23114 Q1: 33549

Med: 39601 Q3: 43024

Max: 54220

Mathematics & Sciences

40
30
20
Frequency 10
0

29
17
4
0

Frequency
0

$ Income

Min: 31920 Q1: 38524

Med: 41940 Q3: 45068

Max: 54261

I was surprised that certain areas of study had some salaries on the lower
end, it did not surprise me at all that Engineering, Computer and Business were on
the higher end of the spectrum. These things are what most people aspire to go into
because they make the most money. Some of the Histograms are skewed only
slightly. I would have expected a bigger pull on most of them; most of them seem to
follow closer to the Normal distribution while some are almost uniform. I am going
into nursing so I believe that my area of study falls under the Humanities & Social
Sciences.
I am not sure as to why there are outliers in the salaries. I can see with what
experience brings but I am not sure that I think it should be that big of an extreme
causing that big of an outlier in certain majors. I think the system is shot and they
are judgmental even though every company says they are not. I dont believe it but
that is just my own vendetta. I think that the distributions are large enough to turn
into a Z distribution, so really the T distribution would be used.
Confidence intervals provide information about point estimates. Confidence
intervals for means are intervals constructed using a procedure that contain the
population mean for a specified proportion of the time, usually you are given the
confidence interval in a problem, but any confidence interval can be chosen.
Depending on how sure you want to be. There is good reason to believe that the
population mean is between two numbers, the confidence interval contains the true
mean. Confidence intervals can show other parameters, not just the mean.

A 95% Confidence interval for the mean of students graduating in Humanities and
Social Sciences.
X + - T* (s / n) =
44982 + 1.676 (7692 / 50) = ($44,724.16, $45,239.84)

A 99% Confidence interval for the true standard deviation of students graduating in
Business
(n-1) (s^2) / X^2 R <

<

(49) (596^2) / 76.154 = 225,500.11

=585908.51

(n-1) (s^2) / X^2 L

(49) (596^2) / 29.707

 225500.11

= 474.86

585908.51

= 765.45

A 80% Confidence interval for proportion of students starting compensation >

$50,000.
P + - Z*

( p)(q)
n

I think that I used the Confidence interval for the mean of students
graduating in Humanities and Social Sciences right, but then the other two the
standard deviation of students graduating in Business and students starting
compensation > $50,000 I dont think I did correctly. The numbers came out to be
something I did not expect. I think on my part in error.
I think doing these tests gives a more general idea of what the students will
be making when they graduate, I like that with the numbers you can actually see
what your future might be giving you at the end of your college career. I know that
my data has errors because of the numbers that I was given, I think its because I
may have used the wrong formula, or even typed it wrong. I am not very good with
excel and have shed many tears over this computer program; another reason why I
was not able to finish this project. The way I would see it being improved is that we
are given the numbers exactly of what to plug in so that there might not be a typo
error on our part, but then this assignment would sort of be pointless. Other than
that I did find it interesting of how big of a starting wage is for the different majors.