Washington University in St. Louis OLIN BUSINESS SCHOOL Eli Snir, Ph. D. Senior Lecturer in Management December 2017 Informing Decisions at the QBA 121 Poster Session – Fall 2017 Informing decisions. One of the key skills attained in a business school education. The ability to ask a question, collect relevant data, distill data into manageable form, undertake an analysis, and present results both to technical and broad audiences, is essential to the success of Olin business school students. These are exactly the attributes that make a successful term paper in QBA 121, Managerial Statistics II. The term paper project requires groups of students to develop hypotheses on a topic of their choice, and then collect and analyze data, to answer their hypotheses. Projects are presented on posters to a broad audience of academics, judges, and fellow students. The dual modes of the assignment, both a technical report and a poster, epitomize the skills of Olin graduates, informing managerial decisions based on rigorous analysis. This poster book is a collection of some of the projects students investigated in the course. Projects in the course encompass all aspects of business, as well as topics of broader political or social interest. One important project this semester evaluates factors that drive college retention rates. On average in the US, only 82% of freshman continue college after their first year, but there is substantial variation across universities. Some universities have only about half the students returning for their sophomore year, while other achieve close to 100% retention rate. Understanding factors that differentiate top performers is important for both administrators and policy makers. Of the statistically significant factors, a few stand out. Lower student-faculty ratio increases retention. There are clear benefits to having more faculty teaching students. In addition, tuition improves retention. The additional services available at institutions with larger budgets have an immediate effect on retention rates. This should inform the public discussion on budgets and resources for higher education. A similar project, this time looking at starting salaries for college graduates, finds that several factors are important. One is that average academic spending is positively correlated with graduates’ salaries, again emphasizing the need to focus resources on students. Surprisingly, in this project, student-faculty ratio is not a significant predictor of salary. Sports projects are quite popular in the course. With the rise of sabermetrics in baseball, and its expansion into other sports, fans have a desire to understand what drives success and now have data to identify attributes of top performers. Some questions evaluated this time are the importance of both offence and defense in explaining wins of MLB teams, and factors that determine player PER in basketball. Looking through the posters collected in this book, you’ll learn about these projects are others. Hopefully, these will pique your interest to apply statistical methods to questions that interest you.
Eli Snir Washington University in St. Louis, Olin Business School • Campus Box 1156 One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, Missouri 63130-4899 Tel (314) 935-6090 • Fax: (314) 935-6359 • snir@wustl.edu