Tom Green, Associate Executive Director, Consulting and SEM, AACRAO; Dan Merian, Director of Enrollment Research and Analysis, University of Michigan Dearborn; and Janet Ward, Senior Consultant at AACRAO, presented a three-hour workshop on the many ways that data are used to support decision-making and strategic enrollment planning and management in higher education. The workshop opened with the importance of research questions, knowing what we want to learn, in the context of the enrollment cycles of higher education. These drive how we collect and report data to inform the progress of students in their educational journeys and to predict how our enrollments may materialize in the short and long terms.
A brief primer on statistics was provided to help participants some of the basic tools, correlation and logistic regression, used by researchers to study student enrollment, both in understanding new student enrollments and the patterns of enrollment, once students enter the institution. Data governance and management was another topic that the team presented as a way to help workshop participants understand the fundamental issues that impact the quality and effectiveness of data usage in SEM.
Three examples of data utilization and research were presented during the workshop. First, Dan Merian showed how data sets are constructed from the various internal and external data sources where student information resides. Second, Janet Ward presented three models of enrollment modeling, including overall/general enrollment, special program or specific population modeling and a institutional aid model. The final example, environmental scanning, was presented by Tom Green. He concluded the workshop with a presentation on enrollment reporting, including a library of enrollment reports. The levels of enrollment reporting, executive, director/manager, and end-user, were discussed to provide successful strategies on how these audiences may access, receive and use enrollment data more effectively.
Handouts from the session are available on the AACRAO website.