Question

One of the colleges in Florida is called Aviator College of Aeronautical Science and Technology. Its annual tuition and fees were reported in 2015-16 as $73,132, making this college an outlier because it was substantially more expensive than any other college in Florida for that year.

An outlier is present in the dataset. The paper homework also displays a boxplot and histogram of the dataset. Based on the information available to you, is the median or mean more appropriate as a measure of "average" tuition and fees for Florida?

Median or

Mean   

Answer 1

We know that the mean is dependent on the all the values present in the data set and median is dependent on the middle value of the data.

In this case, we have Florida college as an outlier due to high Fees. This means there must be some very high fees included in the data set of Florida college

If we consider mean, then we have to take the average of all value which might be high due to few large values

If we consider median, then we have just need the middle value of the entire data set, which must be less than those large values

So, median will be appropriate to use as a measure of average tuition and fees.