Joseph Randal has just been named the director of alumni relationships at a local university. Alumni donations are an important source of revenue for colleges and universities. If administrators could determine the factors that could lead to increases in the percentage of alumni who make a donation, they might be able to implement policies that could lead to increased revenues. Research shows that students who are more satisfied with their contact with teachers are more likely to graduate. As a result, one might suspect that smaller class sizes and lower student/faculty ration might lead to a higher percentage of satisfied graduates, which in turnmight lead to increases in percentage of alumni who make a donation.

Joseph is feeling an extra pressure to increase total giving to the university because of recent budget cuts. Joseph is also feeling pressured to increase the percentage of alumni to give. Joseph found this new metric called average alumni giving rate U.S. News & World Report.

To investigate further, Joseph needs to assemble the data on classes, graduation rates, and most important, alumni giving rates for top 123 colleges and universities based on alumni giving.

The attached data base shows data of the top 123 colleges ranked by U.S. News & World Report.

Questions to be answered in your report:

1. Use methods of descriptive statistics to summarize the data.
2. Develop and estimated simple linear regression model that can be used to predict the alumni giving rate, given the graduation rate. Discuss your findings.
3. Develop an estimated multiple linear regression model that could be used to predict the alumni giving rate using the graduation, % of Classes Under 20, and Student/Faculty Ratio as independent variables. Discuss your findings.
4. Which of the 123 schools has the most (least) impressive giving rate? Discuss your findings.
5. Consider a school that similar to Joseph's university. Joseph's university has 65% graduation rate and a student-faculty ration of 19:1, 37% of the classes have fewer than 20 students, 23% of the classes have more than 50 students, and have a freshman retention rate of 80%. Should Joseph's university giving rate be greater or less than 8%?
6. What conclusions and recommendations can you derive from your analysis?