Download MATH-1410-6A Project 3

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MATH-1410-6A (Spring 2013)
Project 3 – Student Loan Debt
Due: 5-5-2013
Worth: 10 points
For several years, The Institute for College Access & Success has sponsored a program called The
Project on Student Debt in an effort to increase public awareness about rising student debt and its
impact on our society. According to the program’s October 2012 report, Student Debt and the Class
of 2011, recent graduates from public and private nonprofit 4-year colleges carried an average
student loan debt of $26,600, a 5% increase above the 2010 average.
Graduates from public and private nonprofit 4-year colleges in Nebraska carried an average student
loan debt of $24,287 in 2011 and there are fears that this number may have increased by more than
5% in 2012. Suppose you have been asked to conduct a preliminary study on Nebraska student loan
debt for 2012. The data below represent the student loan debts of 28 randomly selected recent
graduates from Nebraska’s public and private nonprofit 4-year institutions.
38,325
19,259
37,652
39,795
28,291
26,555
29,662
39,930
19,381
39,062
33,460
28,032
23,384
30,423
25,424
21,766
25,279
32,699
29,505
23,809
32,315
15,638
23,298
37,310
24,136
26,517
30,337
26,999
i.
Use Excel to find a point estimate for  , the true mean student loan debt of all recent
Nebraska public and private nonprofit 4-year institution graduates.
ii.
Use Excel to find the standard deviation of the 28 student loan debts.
iii.
Use Excel to create a Histogram with 10 classes and/or a Box-and-Whisker plot of the data set.
If we want to create a confidence interval estimate for  , would it be more appropriate to use
a t-distribution or the normal distribution? Justify you answer.
iv.
Use Excel and your results from iii to create a 95% confidence interval for  . Interpret your
results.
v.
Does it appear that the average student loan debt in Nebraska in 2012 increased by more than
5% over the 2011 state average? Justify your answer.
Remember to copy and paste your answers to a Word document. You may e-mail me the document
as an attachment to [email protected] or hand in a hard copy by the above due date. A similar
copy of what I would like from you is shown below (based on the data in the Using Excel to Create
Confidence Intervals for One Population Mean help file).