Canadian University Research Paper

Introduction

Thesis Question

What affects the total number of applicants to a Canadian University?

Thesis Statement

The ranking of different universities is an important aspect when considering the number of applicants the university has. The public and students are more likely to be exposed to better ranked universities rather than poorly ranked universities. That said, with more public awareness, the number of applicants would be higher since people are likely to apply for the universities they have heard of before. Furthermore, students would want to have their education in a well known and well ranked university rather than a unknown, low-ranked university. Universities are ranked based on many aspects such as level of education and prestige,

Refer to Appendix C for a bar graph. The number one ranked university in Canada is University of Toronto. Universite de Moncton, the university ranked 51st, is ranked last in the collected data. As expected, University of Toronto, the number 1 ranked university in Canada, has the highest applicant rate. However, the rankings do not only consider the number of applicants. The data for the ranking of the universities was obtained on the Ranking Web of Universities. Their criteria for the rankings include Quality of Education, Size, Research Output, Impact, and Prestige. This shows that the University of Toronto provides high quality education, is one of the larger universities in Canada, and has a large impact on research in Canada. It is also the most well known university around the world from Canada. Université de Moncton, on the other hand, is not as established as better ranked universities, such as University of Toronto. It is a french university outside of Quebec, located in New Brunswick. The reason is mainly because there may be fewer people outside of Quebec, specifically in East Canada who are studying in French. Additionally, it is a relatively small university, only offering 165 programs to

Therefore, the hypothesis was proven to be correct, as there were more applicants who applied to higher ranked universities such as University of Toronto and University of British Columbia, and less applicants who applied to lower ranked universities such as Universite de Moncton and Mount Allison University. There was one calculated outlier, which is the extremely high applicants to the University of Toronto. There are 89540 applicants to the University of Toronto, which is more than 1.5 times the interquartile range. I did suspect that there be outliers in the data because there are many biases and limitations as mentioned before. The outlier did make the correlation not as strong as anticipated since it is far off the line of best fit. I predict that the reason for the outlier; why University of Toronto has so many more applicants than expected, is because it is the most prestigious university in Canada and it is the most well-known due to the amount of research outputted. There were other data points that were surprisingly out of place, affecting the correlation coefficient. However, they were not considered outliers when making calculations. The outliers played a major role in the strength of correlation, as when they were removed, the coefficient of determination was