I recently conducted a financial planning exercising to focus on savings – after all, college tuition rates are climbing and by the time my son goes to school in 18 years or so, I may be looking at $60,000 a year for a public university. Now is the time to save. In assessing my debts, I’ll admit I’m still paying off a couple of low-interest student loans, and am certainly weighing those in the planning.

I then happened across a story about the College Foundation of North Carolina’s reliance on SAS to accurately counsel the General Assembly on how much financial aid students will need from year to year. Now really, what doesn’t SAS do? Through business analytics, the CFNC saves time to produce this information to policymakers from days to hours. And in doing so, it allows IT resources to focus on other priority issues.

In the future, CFNC will use SAS to help ensure student loans are paid back on time. It will tell CFNC whether a loaner – like me – will have difficulty paying back loans. And with my recent planning in place, I most likely will not be flagged from my company’s software. Shwhew.