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Statistics 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).