From the given table, the equation of the line of best fit is:

where x denotes the years and y the number of students.
Now, the mean of the y-values is

The variance of y-values is given by

By expanding this sum, we have

which gives

By doind the same process for the varible x, we have that the correlation coefficient R is given by:

since this result is near to 1, there is a strong positive relationship between the year and the number of students