It is generally understood that schools with high tuition's often have a high average GPA and expect their incoming and current students to maintain high GPA's. For most people, this implicates that schools with less expensive tuition's often will have a lower average GPA across their students. Is this actually true though? What other implications does tuition price pose across the performance of their students? These are questions I am definitely curious about and am sure new-coming student's are too.
For my project, I would like to analyze if there are any correlations between tuition and average GPA from universities in Pennsylvania, particularly in the PASSHE system. I believe that their is interesting data to be found when comparing all of the schools to each other. I also believe it will be informing to new students about the experience they could potentially have at a university. The slight differences between the average GPA's and tuition's of different schools may be influential enough to affect an incoming student's overall decision of where they would like to attend. As new incoming students are making their final decisions approaching the new year, this graph will give them a different perspective on viewing schools than the advertisements school's put out and may grab their attention way more than they expect. All of this data is public information and can be found online. It would be beneficial to interview a member of faculty in the academic services office to find out their opinion on this matter and whether they believe tuition has a real causing affect on the GPA of their students.
In conclusion, high school student's are finalizing their decision to choose a university to attend. Making them aware of this information would potentially be very helpful, interesting, and influential in their decisions. This can be helpful to parents who are the primary source of funding their child's college tuition and especially someone who is responsible for paying themselves.