Kalamazoo College students' support for a shuttle service

A research team from the Business Statistic Class (spring 2011) conducted a study called “K Transportation Survey”. This study was focus on the transportation preferences of Kalamazoo College students and if they would be willing to support a bus shuttle service to and from common places off-campus, the airport, and the train station. The results demonstrated that there is not strong support for the airport (32%) and the train station (55%) shuttle. However, 77% of students at K showed interest on having a transportation service to and from the common places off-campus paying in average 1.58 dollars per trip.

It also calls our attention that as class standing (year) increases the support for the shuttle service decreases. The research team found that 100% of all the freshman students, 83.33% of all the sophomores, 71.42% of all the juniors and 50% of the seniors who answered the survey support the shuttle service to common places off-campus such as Meijer. The strong support of the freshman population could be due to factors such as the necessity of having a convenient mean of transportation to go shopping as first years are not allow to have cars on campus, or that as the majority of them are new in the area they would like to explore deeply the city of Kalamazoo. The low support from the other groups could be due to the increase of more responsibilities, the study abroad programs, off-campus living and a greater knowledge of the city.

This information is significant and definitely could be used by the Student Development Office at K College. It could help to determinate whether giving the students another transportation option would be beneficial and worth the effort of its implementation.

The Fossil Fuel Fiasco

“Do college students care enough about gas prices to drive significantly further for lower prices?” was the main question asked in a recent survey. A few talented individuals, employed by their own self motivation, set out on a mission to answer this question at a local small liberal arts school in Kalamazoo, Mi. They first hypothesized that students would travel the extra distance to save money but were proven wrong with statistical evidence. Students would rather spend the extra money for the convenience of the closer gas station rather than drive the extra distance. However it was noted that because of the average student has a financial well standing family, most were unwilling to travel the extra distance to save time rather than money.

Also these brilliant statisticians declared students remain unhappy with current gasoline prices and gasoline companies. “65 % of students have no preference or idea of one gas station brand quality to another,” said a survey conducted by the renowned statisticians. A suggestion was made that students are too busy to shop around for gas prices or do not care enough about the corporate world. A respondent was reported saying, “They [Gas Stations] are corrupt and all suck,” further backing the notion that Kalamazoo College students hate corporate America. Each respondent was asked to rate on a hand full of gas stations on their preference of brand from 1 to 5 with an option of answering “Do not know” (1 being the lowest possible rating and 5 being the highest possible rating). Furthermore the report answers numerous questions about consumer preference and prices. The survey targeted upperclassmen because of the strict school wide policy that first-years are not allowed to have cars on campus. No animals were harmed in the abundant attempts to collect data for this survey.

Project Advice

My advice for future students when doing this project is to send out the survey one or two weeks earlier than you really think you should. This will allow participants to have as much time as they need, but also leaves you with more time to analyze the data since it will take longer than expected. Also, thoroughly proofread the questions you ask in your survey, especially those which you are trying to find a correlation between. Make sure that the style of question between those is the same (numerical or categorical) so that when it comes time to analyze the data, they will be compatible. This will definitely make your life easier. Another word of advice, pick a topic you enjoy and that you are interested in. This makes more a more enjoyable process, and you will actually want to research and find statistically significant information.

Dining satisfaction and Social satisfaction

In our survey, completed by 81 K College students, we wanted to find out if people were satisfied with the food here on campus, among other things. We also wanted to see if people were satisfied with their social lives here at K, and compare these results to whether or not those students were more or less satisfied with their social lives at home. Some demographic questions we sought were, gender, varsity athlete or not, ethnicity, intended major, and whether or not students participated in Frelon.

We found many interesting findings regarding social satisfaction. Many questions we asked were based on a 10-point scale (1 little satisfaction to 10 very satisfied). Our sample's average claimed that their satisfaction level of social life here at was at a 7.33, while their satisfaction of home social life was at 7.64. This was interesting to see as many people felt equally satisfied with their social lives here at K and at home.

Another question we asked in the survey gave us some interesting data to work with. We surveyed what time people normally order carry-out or delivery food from local restaurants. We found that 91.36% of our sample orders food after 7:00, which happens to be the same time that our cafeteria here on campus closes. This led us to believe that students were not very satisfied with the hours of the cafeteria. In our survey we also sampled student's satisfaction of the hours of the cafeteria on the same 10-point scale and our sample average was a 5.10. This number is very average and is in agreement with the number we found about carry-out delivery times.

Team spirit: Where does it come from?

Hometown loyalties may not be the toughest link connecting Kcollege students to their favorite sports teams. In a recent study of Kalamazoo College students (sophomores, juniors, and seniors) and their interest in sports,Kalamazoo College business majors found that no clear strong relationship exists between which sports students supported the most and which Professional teams were available in their hometown. What they did find was were smaller relationships between students who were generally more involved in sports and what they were willing to do to support them.

Overall, students who were very interested in sports spent more hours watching sports broadcast throughout the week, they also attended more sports events no regardless of how far the team was from their hometown. Characteristics like gender, income,and city size also did not have a direct relationship to how involved Kcollege students were in sports. They also found that although more people liked basketball and football, they did not always attend more sport events in those seasons. In fact, the most popular season to attend sporting events was summer. The fact that more people supports sporting events in the summer could explain why there is so little school spirit throughout the acaemdic year at K...maybe? Overall, peoples personal preferences seem to be totally based on their individual likes and dislikes, and not relate to what they were exposed to in their hometowns.

Student Spending and Sources of Income

Money is something that plays a role in almost everything. While conducting our survey on student spending and sources of income it was easy to see the relationship amongst many factors. It was evident that students who spend more recieve more, and not from jobs as much, but from outside sources. These relationships show the factors that lead to increase in spending and also what most of the money is spent on.

Students spend a high amount of money on electronics and are huge supporters in the food businesses while in college. This spending however fluctuates by sources of income, cost of tuition, if the student has a job or not, and many more. As one would expect, as the cost of tuition increases per student the amount of spending will most likely decrease along with the parents support of money. Many students carry jobs while in college and in our survey we found that 58.5% of our respondents held a secured job.

There are many things that influence student spending and there are many sources of income students have. Our study was important because it gave people an idea of how students spend their money and what factors may or may not contribute to a student's spending, whether it be monthly, annually, or daily. Also whether it be on things they buy for pleasure(wants) or things they need.

Reflections

The advice i would give future students is the four things that i would have done differently upon reflection. chosen a third proofreading; discussed idea more with friends in order to get more then our two opinions to help us realize more of the correct questions to ask; let Chuck help us even more (more office hours..); and chosen a more quantitative rather then qualitative project (as past participants had advised) although in the end, it was fine.

Gas Mentality

How do we feel about gas? For most students, we can hypothesis that they believe gas and the rising price of gas as a bad thing. But, what does this mean and why is this so? Chris and I decided to do our study on the mentality behind gas for a specific group of people, college students. Our findings were quite interesting. First, the question that sparked the idea was answered quickly and efficiently: “Do college students care enough about gas prices to drive significantly further for lower prices?” We concluded that the majority of students do not mind paying the extra money in order to save time, the reasons being college students are very busy and even if they are not busy at that exact moment, they will want to spend their down time doing more enjoyable things. But as I already stated, this was found quite simply. Other results included: people with more money are generally less likely to travel a further distance for just cheaper gas and people who live off campus use more gas. However, we did find some peculiar results when we found out that barely anyone answered one of our questions. “Rank the following gas brands from 1 to 10.” We hypothesis that the majority of students did not answer because college students (especially at Kalamazoo College) do not care about the corporate world as much as other groups of people would and they particularly do not care about gas companies. We came to this conclusion after reading a side note that one student left on the side of her paper reading, “They are corrupt and all suck.” As this is to be a short yet informative blog post, I will keep the details to a minimum. We asked the students numerous questions about their income, feelings towards current gas prices, car preferences and gas consumption in order to understand them better as a collective group. It took three tries to create a survey that was informative yet allowed students to answer the questions comfortably and truthfully. While we sought after the answer to the question, “Do college students care enough about gas prices to drive significantly further for lower prices?”, we found that our most interesting find was the lack of responses to the gas brand question. We feel that this says a lot about the college and the college student mentality overall.

Advice for students

definitely plan ahead on doing a lot of work and time consuming equations. make sure that you have a great partner and that you both communicate clearly on who is doing what and when to get it done by. hand out as many surveys as you can so your data is actually credible and interesting. thoroughly go through the final project and make sure no mistake are present and that all of the equations are done correctly so that your answers and hypothesis are not wrong. have fun with it and enjoy seeing what students answer on your surveys.

Where are the football fans?

Through a recently conducted market research project, my partner and I studied many different factors that might influence a student's opinion to attend the home varsity football games at Kalamazoo College this past season of 2010. From this research, we discovered that 66% of Kalamazoo College students attended varsity football games while in high school; yet also found that only 41% of current Kalamazoo College students attended at least one varsity football game this past season.

So what makes the difference between attending games while in high school and then in college? A mere 5% of students claimed that the weather forecast held a strong opinion towards their attendance. Only 8% of students reported attending games in the case that a friend attended the particular rival school. 10% of the respondents mentioned that their close friends encouraging them to attend a game held a strong influence on their choice. 19% of the respondents suggested that the availability of free food strongly influenced their decision to attend a game. But the question still remains. What makes this 20% decline in football attendance of the same group of students between high school and college? 10% of the sample strongly agreed that the time of the football game conflicted with other activities and 72% of the students strongly argued that they did not know the schedule of the home team.

From the advertising specs, we found that the only reliable way to spread awareness of the games was through the talk of friends. As mentioned before, 72% claimed to not know the home schedule. But also, 87% claimed they did not hear of the game through Facebook, 84% did not see a sign in the cafeteria, and 83% did not have one of the small cardboard cards with the seasonal sports schedule listed on it (posted by the college). But 58% knew of the game because a friend had informed them of the game. Moreover, 72% of the respondents agreed that they were more likely to attend a game if the stands were expected to be more full. So students, if you want higher attendance rates, start talking!

Thus, my final remark between the characteristics of high school and college attendance rates from the same group of people concludes here. Perhaps these students still fathom the idea of exciting football games that they remember from high school, but perhaps they are now exploring other dimensions of life as well. Is sport marketing the excuse for poor attendance or do students just spend their time pursuing new interests instead?


Sample Size:
After sending 300 mostly randomly selected surveys by email, our final number concluded to 83 finished surveys (the “mostly” part of the random is explained here: we dispatched the unfinished surveys from the final sample, we eliminated the varsity football team from the sample, and all Juniors were not surveyed as we had no differentiated list between the roughly 80% on study abroad and the 20% who were on campus during the last season).

Satisfaction with choosing Kalamazoo College

For our study we wanted to look into how satisfied students were on their decision to attend Kalamazoo College. We thought this survey would be very useful for a couple different groups like: K College, who could use this information to determine what they need to improve to increase students' satisfaction, also for current K students to see how other students feel. To help figure out this information we made and sent out 100 surveys to a random sample of students. The different variables we wanted to look into with the survey included questions looking at the satisfaction of different things like: course registration, available courses, real world preparation, facilities, fields, housing, and security. The survey was completed by 60 students, which gave us a 60% response rate, and the results were very interesting and enlightening.

Some of the interesting information was when asked about overall satisfaction at Kalamazoo College, 10 students were very satisfied, 37 were satisfied, 10 were neutral, 2 were dissatisfied, and none were very dissatisfied. This shows that more than the majority of students are satisfied with their decision to attend K and a only a select few are dissatisfied. Another interesting finding was that while 57 out of 60 students were either satisfied or very satisfied with K's Library, 49 out of 60 students were either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with the fields at K. This shines a light that K has top of the line facilities that students love, however has athletic fields that aren't top of the line and that students don't love. Overall this survey was very successfull in depicting how students about Kalamazoo College and on their decision to attend the school. I believe this study will be very helpful to the school, current and prospective students.

One smart place

The top reason students attend Kalamazoo College? The college's high academic reputation! A recent survey done by two K College students regarding the reasons students attend K College showed that it was the academics that rated the highest. These two students gave out a survey to 106 participants randomly, the questions ranged from student to faculty ratio, academics, and athletics to gender, family income, and financial aid. After compiling their surveys and analyzing the data, they saw that the average student rated academics at an 7.9 on a scale from 1 to 10 (1 being not very important to 10 being very important). The academic reputation at K draws the most students because students desire to learn and excel in their specific field and they know that K College can do this for them. Other top important factors included the coarse load difficulty here at K rating a 7.2 on average and the high acceptance rate into graduate school after K rating 7.4 (all on the 1 to 10 scale). This survey was done to help understand why kids come to Kalamazoo College instead over any other college to help the admissions office know what they should focus their recruitment on and what they shouldn't focus on. So stop and ask yourself why you came to K College? Most likely the high academic prestige has to be one of your major reasons for coming.

Advice For Future Students

Don't procrastinate, get your data collected early and input it all as soon as you collect it. Choose a partner who you know will be helpful and contribute equally. Choose a topic that has lots of potential numeric questions you can ask, since these are the types of questions most easily analyzed statistically. And finally, do good work on the preliminary stuff because much of it can be used in your final project and that helps a lot.

Advice for Future Students

This is a very long project. Do not put it off until the end and try to cram it in. You will regret it. Do a little bit to get ahead and it will be easier for you. Try and get at least 50 people in your survey. Pick a partner that you know will do work. Don't pick someone just because they are your friend.

Advice for Future Students!

Collect data as early as you can. It is very frustrating if you have a massive amount of work you need to do on the project (like regressions and hypothesis testing) but you can’t because you are still collecting data. Dr. Stull gives about a two-week period for you to collect data and turn in your preliminary results. I suggest that you have all your data collected by the end of the first week and use the second week to get a lot of work on the project done. It will save you so much stress later on in the quarter.

Take the intermediate deadlines seriously. The intermediate deadlines are a great way to get a good chunk of the paper done earlier in the quarter. When I got closer to the deadline of the paper, I was really glad I taken the earlier assignments seriously. I did not have to do any additional research for find numbers for my hypothesis testing because I had already done that in an earlier assignment. Having completed the preliminary research results made the a section of the final paper, “Basic Statistics” really easy to complete. The point is, try your best on those intermediate assignments! It makes the later assignments much easier.

Fast Food Spending at Kalamazoo College

A survey at Kalamazoo College was sent asking how many times they go to fast food restaurants and how much they spend there. Within that survey, it compared frequency of going to fast food restaurants and spending with annual income. Of the sample size, 65% were male and 35% female. Of all the college students that were surveyed, it found that the average annual income per month of a Kalamazoo College student was $252. the average spending per trip to a fast food location was $7.91. The favorite fast food restaurant out of the sample was Mcdonalds. This is because of its convenient low prices and has more locations around America then any other fast food restaurant. It is also open 24 hours so with easy access, you can see why people choose Mcdonalds over any other fast food restaurant.

The survey found that there is a negative correlation between frequency and spending compared to income. The more times people go to a fast food restaurant, the more likely they are less to spend their. This proves that people with lower income choose to go to fast food places more often because of lower prices and the convenience of them. Kalamazoo College students who don't make as much money go there quite often but spend less due to annual income. We thought that the higher the income, the more a person would be likely to go to a fast food restaurant and spend more because they have more money. This is not the case with college students. Fast food simply fits into their budget. This could also show that they are also trying to stay healthy as well. Even if students go to fast food restaurants frequently, they are spending less which means getting less food to intake. Students are trying to save money by spending less every time they go to a fast food restaurant.

Saving Money While Abroad: Which Programs Damage your Pocketbook

It seems, unsurprisingly, that studying abroad in First World countries, such as those in Europe, Australia, Israel and Japan will put a serious dent in your pocket. Based on a random sample of 91 students, a recent survey that examined spending for Kalamazoo College students who studied abroad in the last year found that statistically speaking, students who study abroad in First World countries spend significantly more than students who study in Third World Countries.
The study found that average spending in First World countries was $3832.65 while spending for students studying abroad in Third World countries was only $1735.48. Even though there was a lot of variance and difference in the spending of all the individuals surveyed, this difference was still large enough to be statistically significant.
In the study, First World countries were defined as countries with a per capita GDP of over $19,000. The First World country programs tested in the study included Japan, Israel, Australia, and all the European programs. The third World countries tested had GDP per capita’s between $1,600 (Kenya) and $15,500 (Chile). The Kalamazoo College programs located in Third World countries were all the Latin and South American programs, the African programs, and the Thailand and Chinese programs.
The finding that students studying in First World countries are spending more than students studying in Third World countries is not surprising, given the fact that cost of living was found to be significantly related to both total spending abroad and vacation spending abroad. This study found that as the cost of living of a country increases compared to the United States, so does total and vacation spending.
Overall, this study seems to indicate that if you want to spend minimal personal money abroad, it might be a good idea to look at the programs in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, rather than the more expensive European programs.

Summary for a general audience

Why do students attend Kalamazoo College?

A college survey was sent out looking at what different factors that influenced Kalamazoo College student on choosing Kalamazoo. A sample was taken of 100 currents students and analyzed by two current students. The data found that current students felt that when choosing Kalamazoo a large part of their decision had to do with how much financial aid they were going to receive and how reputable the academics were. What this means is that the more money given out to perspective students the more likely they are to come here, and as long as Kalamazoo College remains a reputable institution students will want to come here to be associated with its name. This was determining by using a survey that asked students to rate the importance of these factors. The survey was taken on a scale of 1-5. We will assume that 3 is neutral. From that 100 student sample, the average for importance of academics was 4.19 a significant piece of data, telling us students do feel the academics are a major reason for their choice. Another piece of data was that students averages 3.95 when describing the impact of financial aid, and this numbered paired with the average amount of financial aid received, $20,494.08 means that students do typically receive some scholarship or financial aid from the school and it influenced them to attend Kalamazoo College. From the study done you can see that when trying to get students to attend a college, they will be more receptacle if that colleges name is easily recognized, and highly regarded and if that college gives out offers scholarship and financial aid to their perspective students.

Advice for future projects

It is better to try and look for a topic that does not ask for people to provide info that could get them in trouble or make them feel like they have to expose themselves. Also look for those that do not study something that is not common in the college because of college restrictions. Lastly the research should be able to affect all parts of the community or at least the one you want to study (you would not want to study something that is deemed to be a generic male/female activity because you may not get enough data to work with).

And of cause the generic advice - start early!!!

Advice for future students

Revise your plans carefully as many times as possible with your plans for analysis in mind before having to embark on your research study. Learn to use necessary excel functions if you haven't already. Figure out early on how and in what context you want to present your results.

Chris W.

Music Consumption Survey Study: Online Streaming Takes Over Illegal Downloading

According to the "Music Consumption" survey in Kalamazoo College, which was distributed via e-mail to a randomly selected sample of 250 students from all years and 150 faculty members, where a total of 76 responded. The purpose of the study was to observe the relationship between different music consumption behaviors to amounts of money spent on different sectors of music: recorded, live, and total. A special interest was fixated on the differences between groups of people who do and do not download music illegally.

The population that is being studied imposed a significant bias on the results due to the college's restriction and penalty on illegal downloading, but the study had to be carried on that way. The information obtained from the survey included number of concerts attended in the past 6 months, ticket and transportation costs, spending on studio recorded music and merchandises, frequency of purchasing physical copies from physical and online stores, purchasing digital downloads, illegal downloading, and online streaming from various sources (Grooveshark, YouTube, Pandora, etc.). The population of the college spent averages of $119.04 (62.4%) on recorded music, $54.48 (28.6%) on live music, $17.22 (9.0%) on merchandises and attended 2.88 concerts in a year. With the average of about 20 days per month of online streaming, the Kalamazoo College population appear to consume music by this method almost five times more than the rest combined with illegal downloading coming second with a mere 3.5 days per month.

Correlations were tested for spending on live, recorded and total spending on music with frequencies of consuming music by different methods as well as demographics. The only significant correlations found were that people who spend more on recorded music also spend more on live music and vice versa. Females also appear to spend less in total on music than males. There were no apparent correlations between income and different music consumption behaviors and spending on music. Note that these results only represent the Kalamazoo College population. Results are likely to differ with populations that do not face direct monitoring of restriction policies on illegal downloading.

Other data show that at a lower price, people in Kalamazoo College are quite interested in buying more recorded music, somewhat but not that interested in buying more physical copies, very interested in attending more live concerts, and not interested in paying a monthly fee for legal downloading and streaming services.

Fun Fact - Ranking of preferred music genres in K-College:

1. \m/Rock \m/

2. Classical

3. Pop

4. Hip Hop

5. Jazz and Soul

6. World

7. Electronic Dance

8. Country

- Supanat (Chris) Wachiralappaitoon

Kalamazoo College Music Consumption

The music consumption music we did showed that there are relations between spending on recorded music and spending on other types of music consumption. Of these music consumptions we looked at illegal consumption, online (streaming) consumption and legal expenditure on music. Legal expenditure includes both online and physical purchases and live (concerts/recorded) music. In addition we considered the effect of gender on all the types of consumption. We measured engagement in music and how it may affect consumption in any form.

We found a positive correlation between illegal downloading and streaming against music expenditure. This shows that as more services for music consumption are available expenditure on physical copies may be threatened. This however does not imply that other forms are harmful to those who depend on producing physical music. This is because we saw that even with so many online service providers those who are really engaged in music still continue to buy physical copies.

Analysis done shows that women spend a lot less on music compared to males, that took that study. Of the 69% women who took the survey only about 29% of then download music illegally. Illegal downloading does not seem to be a common method in the college because of schools rule and also government punishments that are attached to piracy. However it should be remembered that some parts of the world illegal downloading is the main way to get music, hence the effect of flexible laws does affect businesses in the music industry.

It can also be seen, from the study, that spending on live music is more preferred than buying physical copies. We could not find any correlation between music consumption and income because even those who do not earn anything seem to provide information about their consumption habits. This was a surprising discovery. This does not prove anything because the sample was pooled from college students who do not earn any money. Despite this we saw that even some of the stuff did not spend much on music despite their income levels. You do not need to be rich to listen to music!!!

Advice for Future Students

Choose your partners wisely preferable not a close friend. Secondly, use your time wisely. Do not procrastinate on sending out your samples. The earlier you send your sample the earlier you get your project done and also you give time for the respondents to answer your surveys without feeling pressured.

Summary of attendance at varsity football home games at K - College for 2010 Season

Our research project was based on studying the attendance of K- College students at varsity football home games during the 2010 season. We also collected data on the number of varsity home games that students attended for all sports that are held in the fall season . We investigated different factors that could have contributed towards our respondents decision to attend a football home game. These factors included time constraints, familiarity with football, familiarity with a rival football team, advertising and other factors like weather forecast, time of the game and free food.
Our results showed that our respondents attended more male games ( average of 0.9) as compared to the female home games (average of 0.6). This might be because our respondents see male sports more entertaining and fun in comparison to female sports. As a result, they are more willing to attend male games.
Also, the respondents who seem to like football also have an understanding of the rules of football. Thus, they are more likely to attend a football home game. The home's team chance of winning played a crucial role in our respondents decision to attend a football game (73%). On the other hand, the winning record or history with the rival team had little effect in influencing our respondents decision to attend a game (87%). This is a very interesting observation because our respondents attend a varsity football home game expecting the team to win even though the records of the home team with the rival team might show otherwise. There can be two explanations for this observation. Firstly, there is loyalty to the home team from the fans; thus, the team records does not affect their attendance. Secondly, our respondents might not have any knowledge of the records of the varsity football home team with rival teams. As a result, they attend a game hoping the team will win even though they have no knowledge of the records of the football home team. In this case, the winning record or history of the home team with the rival team has no influence on their decision to attend the game.
Additionally, the time of day that the varsity football home game is set to take place and the weather forecast has little influence on our decisions to go to a football game. However, the availability of free food and the attendance of other persons to the home game plays an important role in our respondents decision to attend a game. Free food always attracts people to an event even if they stay for a little while which helps in increasing attendance.
Different persons will find our results interesting as the results will help them in planning for future events. More advertsing and incentives might be needed to attract more fans to female varsity home games in the future.

General Summary for an Audience

Our study on the driving factors behind a student's decision to come to Kalamazoo College provided some solid results that can potentially be used by the College's office of admissions in order to attract more potential students. The variables that proved the most influential in a student's decision to come to K were it's high admission rates into graduate/professional school, it's 12:1 student to faculty ratio, and its high academic reputation. Their mean values on a scale of 1-10 (1 being not important and 10 being very important) were as follows: 7.44, 7.62 , 7.91. Interestingly enough, all of these top variables revolve around academic excellence and a professional career. The variables studied with the least importance on a student's decision to come to Kalamazoo College were it's small student body, close proximity to Western Michigan University, and it's close proximity to the cities of Kalamazoo and Portage. Their mean values on a scale of 1-10 (1 being not important and 10 being very important) were as follows: 5.98, 4,59, 4.41. This goes to show that the majority of students come to K with the sole intention of a superior education, not a superior social life. The average family income of a student at Kalamazoo College was $147,000. This was proven to be statistically different from the average family income of a United States family at $45,000.
One of the interesting things we found had to deal with the distance from Kalamazoo College that the average students is from. The smallest percentage of students were within 0-50 miles with only 13.2%, the second largest came from 300-up miles, with 17.9% students, the third largest percentage came from 150-300 miles with 29.3% and the largest percentage came from 50-150 miles with 39.6%. We found this interesting because usually colleges get a large influx of students that reside close to the college (0-50 miles), but it seems that Kalamazoo College receives most of its students from farther areas.
All in all, in order for a Kalamazoo College to draw in potential students, instead of losing them to its much larger public university counterparts, they need to stress the variables that proved to be most important in a students decision to come to K and avoid stressing the variables that those student's viewed as unimportant. . Further studies can build off of this one find even more influential variables in a student's decision to come to Kalamazoo College.