SMU Graduation Analysis

The purpose of this project was to analyze US census data in order to select the most ideal location for a new Southern Methodist University campus.

In order to do the analysis, as part of a group project, I cleansed and manipulated the U.S census data into information relevant to answer our question. It was important to look at population data when working on a project like SMU’s next campus to understand the potential students pipeline by state. 

Most importantly, we wanted to make sure that the decision of the location is based on two major factors:

First, the population size; second the population annual growth. It was also critical to highlight that the location does not have a declining population even if it is on the high side. After analyzing the data we created two visualization views that clearly showed  what states were growing in population over time and what states did not. 

Figure 1.

My recommendation is to open a new SMU campus in either Texas or California. Texas is a great option because it is in the top 2 states in terms of population size and it has the highest population growth out of all 50 states. However, the SMU's main campus is already located in Texas, so the second-best option would be to open a new campus in California. As can be seen in Figure 1, California has the largest population, and its population is growing at a steady rate. The recommendation is based on only two variables; therefore, the recommendation could be debatable because it was based on only to variables and not sufficient to make such as major business decision. 

Knowing that, this is a school project that met its objective to teach us how to answer a business question through data, facts and analytics. I will be taking this exercise to the next level on my own during the Summer of 2021 as a personal challenge. I will get more data sources, multiple variables and will perform deeper analytics, that will result in a stronger recommendation. 

More to come!