Alonmarom/us-college-basketball-expenses
US Collegiate Basketball Expenses Analysis – EDA Project This project explores historical athletic spending data from U.S. colleges and universities. The goal was to analyze spending trends and disparities in men's and women's basketball programs across different collegiate divisions. Dataset Overview Source: U.S. Department of Education / IPEDS / Kaggle Size: 132,327 entries (Filtered subset for Basketball: 8,443 rows). Target Variables: exp_men and exp_women… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Alonmarom/us-college-basketball-expenses.
US Collegiate Basketball Expenses Analysis – EDA Project
This project explores historical athletic spending data from U.S. colleges and universities. The goal was to analyze spending trends and disparities in men's and women's basketball programs across different collegiate divisions.
Dataset Overview
Source: U.S. Department of Education / IPEDS / Kaggle Size: 132,327 entries (Filtered subset for Basketball: 8,443 rows). Target Variables: exp_men and exp_women (Basketball Expenses).
Data Cleaning & Preparation
- Missing Values: NaN values in all financial columns (e.g., expenses, revenue) were imputed with zero (0).
- Filtering: The dataset was strictly filtered to include only "Basketball" entries.
- Outliers: Retained (Not removed), as extreme spending values belong to top-tier NCAA Division I programs and are critical for trend projection.
Descriptive Statistics
Gender Disparity: Average spending for Men's Basketball ($0.92M$) is more than double that of Women's Basketball ($0.43M$). Skewness: The Mean is significantly higher than the Median (e.g., Men's Median is $0.13M$), indicating that a few high-resource programs drive the overall average. Correlation: Extremely high correlation (0.99) between Expenses and Revenue, indicating high spending is tied directly to high revenue generation.
Research Questions
Q1: What is the historical trend and projection for expenses? → Strong, consistent upward trend for both genders (2003–2018), projecting continued spending escalation.
Q2: Which divisional classification drives the highest expenses? → NCAA Division I-FBS and Division I without football account for the highest expenditures and the largest gender spending gap.
Q3: Is the gender spending gap consistent across divisions? → Yes — the financial disparity (Men > Women) is persistent across all divisions (NCAA I, II, and III).
Conclusion
The EDA confirms that Institutional Classification and Revenue Generation are the strongest factors influencing basketball spending. Future spending is projected to increase sharply, and the significant gender disparity observed across all divisions is expected to persist.
4. Video Presentation
A short video presentation summarizing the EDA findings and conclusions: