Suppose a researcher wishes to determine whether there is a difference in the average age of nursing students who enroll in a nursing program at a community college and those who enroll in a nursing program at a university.

In this case, the researcher is not interested in the average age of all beginning nursing students; instead, he is interested in comparing the means of the two groups. His research question is, Does the mean age of nursing students who enroll at a community college differ from the mean age of nursing students who enroll at a university?

Here the hypotheses are:

\[H_0:\text{ }\mu_1=\mu_2\]

\[H_1:\text{ }\mu_1\neq\mu_2\]

Where \(\mu_1=\) average number of nursing students from a community college and \(\mu_2=\) average number of nursing students from a university.

The *TRICK* here is we can restate this hypothesis as:

\[H_0:\text{ }\mu_1-\mu_2=0\]

\[H_1:\text{ }\mu_1-\mu_2\neq0\]