Problem Definition

For the course project, you have to investigate the question:
Is university education worth it?
This is a broad and open-ended question, and you are not expected to address it in its totality. Your goal is to focus on one or more specific aspects of the question, which you will tackle with the help of data and the techniques you learned in class. For example, you can look at the average salary of a STEM BSc, or the expected time it takes to amortize a degree in Statistics. The actual choice of research questions is up to you, and so is the choice of appropriate data to address them.

Data

There are no fixed data assigned to the project; you have to select the data to use based on the questions you want to address. UofT members have access to a wealth of Canadian data through CHASS and ODESI, both of which provide individual records (i.e. microdata) from several nationwide surveys conducted by Statistics Canada. Good places to start are:

  • Education Data
    • Tuition and Living Accommodation Costs (TLAC)
    • Student Financial Survey (SFS)
    • National Graduates Survey (NGS)
  • Employment Data
    • Labour Force Survey (LFS)
    • Canadian Income Survey (CIS)
  • General
    • Canadian Census
      Other available resources are UofT’s Data Library and the Government of Canada’s Open Data Portal. You can also collect your own data, e.g. using web scraping to extract information from online job postings.

Deliverables

There are three milestones for the project: a proposal, a draft, and a final presentation.

  • Proposal: must outline the chosen research questions and the data used to answer them. This is to ensure you have though about the project, as well as an opportunity to get guidance. (rubric/template)

  • Draft: must include the basic core of your analysis and results. Again, the purpose is to make sure you are on track, and that you have an opportunity to receive feedback and make corrections (rubric/template)

  • Final Presentation: a set of slides that you will use for delivering a 5-minute presentation of your results. You will also have to submit the full code that you used for your analysis and for generating the slides. (rubric/template)

Teamwork

The project is to be completed in teams of two to four students. Allocation to teams is based on the results of an online survey, and there is another final survey where each student will evaluate their team mates’ contribitions. The final project marks for each student will be determined by the overall project marks adjusted by an individual contribution factor.