This week, I was able to construct a scatterplot with academic term on the horizontal axis, and the logarithm of the instructional fees on the vertical axis. The raw data is seen below:

YEAR  FEES
1960  $100
1971  $170
1980  $306
1990  $1146
2000  $2157
2010  $4161
2018  $4548

Using R Studio, I created a data frame and used the tidyverse library features to create a plot with the table. To mix things up, I changed some of the features of the plot. I made each observation an orange color with a square shape. For the segmented lines connecting the observations, I increased the line thickness so that it may appear more visible. The horizontal and vertical axes were labeled as “Academic Year” and “Log of Instructional Fees, in US Dollars,” respectively. The title of the plot was re-named to “A Scatterplot of Bowling Green State University Instructional Fees Per Academic Year from 1960 to 2018.”

The final product is seen below:

From this plot, we can determine that instructional fees have consistently increased from the year 1960 to 2018. Particularly, I notice a sharp increase between the years 1971 and 1980, and an additional large jump between 1980 and 1990. This most likely reflects the value of the US dollar per year and the rising expenses of higher education. It is wise to note that from 1990 to 2010, the rate of increase for instructional fees appears to be mostly constant. However, since we are working with only three total observations in this interval, we cannot definitively conclude that this is the case for every year. One last important trend I noticed is that the rate of increase is lower between the years 2010 and 2018. Perhaps this is an indicator that higher education costs will still increase, but at a much lower rate to accommodate for incoming college students.

In the plot, I made a green, dashed vertical line to denote the year (2012) when I started my undergraduate studies at Ohio State. As one would expect, those fees are slightly higher than those from the 2010 term. If I were to use the graph as my barometer for the 2012 fees, I would expect the fees to have been between $4200 and $4300 for that term. Based on my current student loan balance, this would not be too surprising.

In this project, there were a few minor challenges. I have never created a vertical line with an annotation on a plot before, which required me to do some Google research to make sure I was constructing the correct line for the year 2012. In addition, there were some initial formatting issues with labeling the axes and title, but those matters were resolved quickly.