Assessing New Market Entry Case

Background

After graduating, you join an international education startup. The startup coordinates with pre-college students want to attend university in the US. International students are often unfamiliar with the US college-application process, particularly since in many countries university admissions is determined by performance on a single, government- sponsored exam. Students struggle to compile a strong application packet, have little idea which colleges and universities they should target, and do not fully utilize the financial aid and scholarship opportunities available to them. Your startup guides students through the application process, and, moreover, provides on-going support for students after they are admitted to help them acclimatize to American culture and lifestyle, and succeed academically.

Of course, your firm is a social enterprise startup, not a charity. At the end of the day, students pay for your services.

After initial success, the company is considering expanding its reach into a new market. Your job is to provide a recommendation. As part of this strategic decision, you’ve compiled a dataset of a few relevant market indicators for the countries under consideration. Specifically, using publicly available data at Gap Minder, you’ve compiled the following metrics:
• The total male population as of 2015
• The total female population as of 2015
• The 2015 GDP per capita
• The % of total income earned by the top 10% highest earners in 2015
• The % of total income earned by the top 20% highest earners in 2015
• The amount of money (per capita) spent on higher-level (tertiary) education expressed as a percentage of GDP per capita
• The number of people between the ages of 20-39 in 2015

Questions
Download the datasets “market_entry.txt” and “Countries-Continents.csv" to answer the following questions. You should use Excel for your analysis.

You may work with others in your class, but must submit your own write-up.

1. What are the 3 most populous countries in the dataset? (Total population includes both men and women.)

2. Which three countries have the highest GDP (measured in total $)? (Remember, GDP is different from GDP per capita.) You may have to estimate this from the data you have.

3. Which three countries spend the most on higher education per capita?

4. For each continent, determine how many countries are in that continent in the data set.
Hint: You may want to add “Countries-Continents.csv” as a separate spreadsheet and do a vlookup(). You may also want to create a pivot table.

5. On average, how much does each continent spend on education ($ per capita)?

6. If we limit ourselves to countries with at least 6 million people between the ages of 20-39, how much does each continent spend (on average) on education per capita?
Hint: You may need to use an “IF” Statement to create a new column to indicate if the country has 6 million people in the right age range and modify your pivot table.

Assessing New Market Entry Case Background After graduating,...