Question

Salaries of bachelor’s degree graduates. PayScale, Inc., an online provider of global compensation data, conducts an annual salary survey of bachelor’s degree graduates. Three of the many variables measured by PayScale are the graduate’s current salary, mid-career salary, and the college or university where they obtained their degree. Descriptive statistics are provided for each of the over 400 colleges and universities that graduates attended. For example, graduates of the University of South Florida (USF) had a mean current salary of \(57,000, a median mid-career salary of \)48,000, and a mid-career 90th percentile salary of $131,000. Describe the salary distribution of USF bachelor’s degree graduates by interpreting each of these summary statistics.

Short answer

The average current salary is $57,000; half of the graduates get less than $48,000, and another half get more than $48,000. Also, 10 percent of graduates get above $131,000.

Step-by-step solution

Elucidating descriptive statistics

Whenever a researcher generates descriptive statistics, the researcher mainly finds different measurements that summarize a long dataset.The measurements mainly include mean, variance, standard deviation, median, and others.

Interpreting the summary statistics

The word, “mean” signifies average, and so $57,000 is the average salary of the graduates passed out from the University of South Florida. As the median is $48,000, it means that half of the total number of graduates are earning less than $48,000, and the other half are earning more than $48,000. Also, 90 percent of the graduates earn below $131,000, which means10 percent earn more than $131,000.