A data set to share

19 views

Skip to first unread message

Callis, Laura

unread,

Sep 29, 2026, 6:08:41 PM (6 days ago) Sep 29

to EAPOST Group

Hi stats friends!

I had Claude get some more recent data on colleges prices, attached. My students seem to understand the college tuition data set that's preloaded in the Multiple Variables applet (https://www.rossmanchance.com/applets/2021/multreg/multreg.html), but the data is from 2012 and we've seen costs sky rocket in our area, so they're beginning to get a little suspicious. This data set, attached, also includes these new variables:

Net Price, which is the average that students actually pay after financial aid
Salary, which is graduates' median salary 10 years after entry into the workforce
Debt, which is the average debt students graduate with

I remember my high school guidance counselor saying that private colleges may cost more, but they also have more money to give away - that's something we could explore with this data set. Students have also sometimes wondered when we investigated with the 2012 data whether a private college education is better than a public education (I'm a public school graduate but teach at a private school, so this interests me!), especially as our state is now providing almost free college for low- and lower-middle- income families. (So, per GAISE, real data with context and purpose.) You could even make your own new variable about return on investment, looking at the Debt and Salary and NetPrice variables, and have a discussion about how to use those to make an ROI variable.

One thing that is worth discussing is where this data came from. This is not a random sample - in fact, I'm not sure how AI decides what colleges to include. In the conversation, it seemed like it assumed I wanted to be sure to include both highly selective and less selective collegs from different parts of the country. If I ask it, AI will sometimes provide after the fact reasoning, looking at its own output; I don't know if we can ever really be sure how it decided on these colleges. (Did it go through alphabetically? Did it get stuck and skip any?) There is a tab for the sources that the AI claims to have used.

This sheet has all of the spaces removed from the words, so you should be able to copy and paste into the applets for exploration. I sometimes will put the data in a Google sheet and then delete the rows and columns that are empty so students can type CTRL+A to select all before copying without any spacing issues. I'll often make a tinyurl for them to access the data, too, in case of LMS outages.

I hope this is something fun to play with for your students!

Dr. Laura Callis

Co-Principal Investigator:

Discourse to Improve Student Conceptual Understanding of Statistics in Inclusive Settings

Professor, Department of Science and Mathematics

Curry College, Milton, MA

Learning Commons S-201

(617) 333-2130

www.inclusivestatistics.com

Tuition_ROI_Dataset_RossmanChance.xlsx