Data Collection

 
 
 
 
 
 
Age Correlation To College Education Analysis
BJ
MAT308
Wilmington University
 
 
 
 
 
 
Research Question and Relevance
Every year in the United States, the cost for a higher education continues to increase while wages remain stagnant. Along with this, more employers are now requiring a Bachelor’s degree for employment. (Hess, 2019) As a current student going for my own Bachelor’s degree and an individual that would like to help high school students pursue higher education, I was curious as to whether or not people in the United States have been more or less likely to pursue a Bachelor’s degree. Are employers pushing people to get degrees? Or is the higher cost of a degree making it less obtainable to individuals? To find answers to these questions I asked, Are Baby Boomers (individuals born between 1944-1964) more likely to have a Bachelor’s degree compared to Generation X (individuals born between 1965-1979)? This will determine if there is a steady increase or decrease in obtaining a higher education, or no changes at all.
Data Description and Data Collection
The two populations studied were both Baby Boomers (born between 1944-1964) and Generation X (born between 1965-1979). I chose 30 individuals from each group to study for a total of 60 participants. (n=60) I conducted the survey myself, by sending a Google Survey to individuals I knew of these age groups asking the year they were born, and if they have a Bachelor’s degree or not. I used cluster sampling by surveying these two groups and randomly selecting answers among them. I may have experienced sampling bias throughout my collection as I have only sent out the survey to individuals I know and their friends. Because I am not able to accurately collect data on everyone in the country, it may not be the most accurate data to represent everyone in these age groups. Doing a test in another part of the country or even another city, may yield different results.
Data Organization
The data I collected can be seen in Table 1 showing how many of the Generation X and Baby Boomer Generation individuals have a Bachelor’s Degree. Figure 1 represents that data in a Histogram.
 
Table 1
Comparing Education Level with Age

 
Figure 1
Comparing Education Level with Age
Data Analysis
In order to compare the level of Bachelors degrees obtained between both Generations, I performed a Test of Independence to determine a correlation between the two. (α = 0.05, DF = 1) My hypotheses for this test were as follows:
Ho: Education Level is independent to Age.
Ha: Education level is dependent to Age.
Table 2 shows my contingency table used for the Test of Independence. The test yielded a test statistic of 1.6835 and a p-value of 0.1945. The p-value is higher than the level of significance, 0.05. Therefore I do not reject Ho, and stick with the hypothesis that education level is independent of age.
Table 2
Contingency Table

 
My descriptive statistics for all of the ages are shown in Table 3. The mean age for all participants in this study is 58.96 or rounded up, 59. The Median age was 60, this along with the mean could show that a majority of participants leaned towards being in the older side of their respective groups. The Standard deviation is 12.06, showing how the data is spread out.
Table 3
Descriptive Statistics

 
Conclusions
This data has shown that there is in fact no clear correlation shown by my data that age and the likelihood of obtaining a Bachelors degree are dependent on each other. Overall, this means that the rising increase of college education may not be deterring individuals from going to school to obtain their degree. Whether or not this changes with future Generations, would be an interesting test to do in the future to see if this conclusion still holds. Going forward it would also be beneficial to see if my results still stand using census data, and examining the population as a whole, compared to my small sample of individuals I know.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
References
Hess, A. J. (2019, December 13). The cost of college increased by more than 25% in the last 10 years-here’s why. Retrieved December 03, 2020, from https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/13/cost-of-college-increased-by-more-than-25percent-in-the-last-10-years.html