Reporting can reveal last year’s graduation rates or this semester’s completion rates at a local community college. But drilling further into that data to ask why students aren’t graduating or why they aren’t enrolling requires more complex analysis. At Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio, college administrators and professors are
When your job involves making decisions that affect thousands of college students, making the right decisions can have a large impact on the future. Giving college administrators easy access to reliable analytics can help improve enrollment and graduation rates – and find answers to complex questions that cut across many
For thousands of years, the human experience has been recorded by storytellers. Stories tell the tale of our lives: beginning, middle and end. Stories document the triumphs and tragedies of heroes and villains and everything in between. Human beings are storytellers -- it's a trait as uniquely human as an
How do public higher education institutions get funded? In the past, state funding was tied to enrollment, but now more states are tying funding to institutional performance. State Legislatures want more accountability for money spent on higher education and have turned to performance-based funding (also called outcomes-based funding). As such,
When SAS Scotland gave students 48 hours to build a prototype computer system to help increase police effectiveness, nine teams accepted the challenge. The venue was the University of Glasgow's Hackathon, one of the largest student hackathons in the UK, attracting 200 attendees. SAS Scotland has co-sponsored the event for the past three
Hidely-hodely, everyone! As you might imagine, the size and variety of the gift inventory at the North Pole puts Wal-Mart to shame. And while we’ve been at this for hundreds of years, we still make too many of some things and not enough of others. No elf can forget the
You could argue that it’s misguided for someone like me to say data science doesn't have to be difficult. After all, I’ve been in the industry for many years and should have a few tricks up my sleeve for dealing with data. But with the latest data visualisation technology –
Know your data. Do a needs analysis. Organize for success. Empower users. These are four best practices for data and analytics that you'll want to hear more about. In my first three posts in the Analytics in Real Life blog series, we learned how higher education customers are using SAS and why
I read an article recently discussing how runners inevitably slow down with age, particularly after 50. Data from the New York Marathon and Boston Marathon back this up with generally flat average finishing times for ages 20-49 followed by a steady, almost exponential, increase after 50. I haven’t reached the
As a linguist, I am fascinated with words, their meanings and use. So when I recently saw the words “learning analytics” in a conference paper title, I started thinking about the prevalence of the word “analytics” itself. In the last decade, we have preceded “analytics” with many modifiers referring to
