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Showing posts from November, 2015

How will demographics change enrollment?

Ever since I started in admissions, people have been talking about demographics changes and challenges, and the chant continues.  The future, we're told, will look very different than the present. Our trade paper, the Chronicle of Higher Education, ran an article about how this might affect higher education.  It included lots of interesting charts and graphs, but didn't allow me to look at the data in the ways I wanted to.  So I downloaded it and started looking at it using Tableau. This is as much a testament to self-service BI as it is to the trends in the data.  I've often spoken about the 80/80 rule of business intelligence: 80% of what an analyst gives you, you don't need; 80% of what you want isn't in the report.  I spent a long time playing with and slicing this data to see if I could find a way to present it that makes sense, and that gives people what they want.  And every time I answered a question, I generated several more ("what if" can was