Economics And Quantitative Analysis

Prepare a 1,200 word report that addresses the following questions:

1. Provide a descriptive analysis of the two variables (e.g., mean, standard deviation, minimum and maximum) 
2. Develop a scatter diagram with retention rate as the independent variable. What does the scatter diagram indicate about the relationship between the two variables?
3. Develop and estimate a regression equation that can be used to predict the graduation rate (%) given the retention rate (%) 
4. State the estimated regression equation and interpret the meaning of the slope coefficient 
5. Is there a statistically significant association between graduation rate (%) and retention rate (%).  What is your conclusion? 
6. Did the regression equation provide a good fit? Explain.
7. Suppose you were the president of South University. After reviewing the results, would you have any concerns about the performance of your university compared to other online universities? 
8. Suppose you were the president of the University of Phoenix. After reviewing the results, would you have any concerns about the performance of your university compared to other online universities?

Purpose

The objectives of this research are:

• To carry out a descriptive analysis of retention rate (RR) and graduation rate (GR).
• To determine the relation between retention rate (RR) and graduation rate (GR) and estimate GR using RR.
• Evaluate if the performance of University of Phoenix and South University is good. 
• Recommend steps to enhance the performance of online universities.

Background

Currently, the rise of online universities has become one of the big talking points in the higher education industry. Online Education Database is an autonomous organization whose goal is to form a comprehensive list of registered online colleges (Freedman 2007). Using the source data containing the data points for retention rate and graduation rate on different online universities, the relation between RR and GR was analyzed.  

Method

Data for this research was gathered from twenty universities in the US. The variables taken for this research were the retention rate (RR) and graduation rate (GR). Quantitative analysis strategy was employed for answering the objectives of this research (Armstrong 2012). Univariate and bivariate analysis were employed to analyze the objectives of this research.  Descriptive statistics were employed to describe the variables such as RR and GR (Good & Hardin 2009). Regression analysis was employed to the relation between RR (predictor variable) and GR (predicted variable). Scatter diagram was employed to plot the relation between GR(predicted variable) and RR (predictor variable).