This project analyzes how college students allocate their monthly budgets across key spending categories. The dataset comes from Kaggle and includes self-reported data on expenses, financial aid, and income.
To uncover trends in student spending behavior:
- How do spending habits change by year in school (Freshman to Senior)?
- Do certain majors spend more on tech, books, or entertainment?
- What is the average spending-to-income ratio by year?
- Python
- pandas
- matplotlib
- numpy
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Data cleaning (drop redundant columns, handle outliers)
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Total monthly spending calculation
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Spending-to-income ratio computed as:
spendingRatio = Total Monthly Spending / (Monthly Income + Financial Aid)
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Visualizations:
- Boxplots of spending categories
- Bar charts of spending by major and year
- Spending ratio distribution across academic years
- Spending-to-income ratios are most variable for Juniors and Seniors, who show more high-end outliers
- Sophomores tend to have a tighter and more consistent financial profile with fewer outliers
- Freshmen and Seniors spend more on personal care, possibly related to onboarding and career preparation
- Tech-related majors tend to invest more in technology and books