Explaining Student Debt Levels at Kansas Universities

Abstract

Student debt levels in graduates have historically risen each year. As undergraduate students, it is important for us to analyze what factors lead to more or less student debt. Our null hypothesis for our research is that there is no statistical relationship between costs of attendance and average student debt levels. When measuring costs of attendance, we determined that it was best to use tuition and costs as our first independent variable. we also decided to include the average estimated grant or scholarship aid for full-time beginning undergraduate students and the average ACT scores. Average ACT scores are included because higher ACT scores result in more scholarship aid offered by universities. These two explanatory variables help explain the correlation between costs of attendance and student debt.