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SAS® Helps Sinclair Increase EnrollmentSinclair Community College in Dayton, OH, has historically enjoyed one of the highest student penetration rates among Ohio community colleges. But as Dayton’s population has declined in recent years while federal and local accountability expectations have increased, Sinclair needed to enhance its enrollment-management strategy. In doing so, Sinclair leaders realized that they needed to maximize their data assets. So they turned to SAS for help. 
Check out this video to learn more about Sinclair Community College and its successes with SAS.View Video (Runtime: 4 mins, 30 secs)You have questions; our customers have answers. Check out this video Q&A. 
Dr. Ken Moore View Video 
Karl Konsdorf View Video (Requires Windows Media Player 6.4.7 or higher or RealPlayer 6 or higher) One of the top-12 two-year institutions in North America, Sinclair Community College has about 23,000 students and is a participant in the “Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count” program to increase community college success rates. Like most community colleges, it strives to improve retention and graduation rates. That’s not an easy task when nearly half its students are low-income workers who hold down full-time jobs, and more than half need remedial help. Couple those challenges with flat funding, and Sinclair concluded it needed to analyze its own data to serve current and potential students even better. Sinclair chose SAS for data analysis because it can be used without programming knowledge and it puts access to the data and reports in the hands of end users. In fact, Sinclair created a Business Intelligence Competency Center by merging an institutional planning team with an analytics and reporting team. The center was created to be the school’s single source of decision-support information.
First increase in years Enrolling more students helps the college meet its fiscal needs, especially since state funding can change from year to year. “Also, Ohio has one of the lowest college attainment rates in the United States,” Konsdorf says. “Increased enrollment will help the state meet its goal of improving the college attainment rate of its citizens.” Portraits of success
“It takes about seven years, on average, for someone to graduate. With data analysis, we will be able to find out why it is taking that long, and then we can predict which factors contribute to more timely graduation so that we can help students graduate faster,’’ says Dr. Ken Moore, Sinclair’s Senior Vice President. The cluster project’s biggest success occurred before fall term 2006. After years of growth, Sinclair enrollment had leveled off as the Dayton area lost population because of the ailing auto industry. Six weeks before the term started, it looked like enrollment would drop by 14 percent from the year before. Using SAS, Sinclair identified students who were most likely to enroll. Then counselors, department heads and teachers began calling those students – both enrolled and admitted – and helped them work through issues that had kept them from signing up for classes. By the end of the “Success Squad” push, the college saw an improvement of 1percent over the previous year’s fall-term enrollment. “Now we’re planning to make it an every-term occurrence,’’ Moore says. “One student success factor that we found using SAS – particularly for students who juggle jobs and children – is offering the right courses at the right locations and at the right times,” Moore says. In the past, the school scheduled classes based on gut instinct and often had to cancel under-enrolled classes after registration or turn away students from over-enrolled courses. “We aren’t canceling classes anymore,” Moore says. “We know ahead of time which sections are going to grow, and our chairs are able to find faculty so that we don’t have to worry about accommodating students.” The college also looked at who applies versus who enrolls. “This helps us choose where to spend our limited marketing and counseling dollars,’’ Moore says. Community college education is considered critical to Ohio’s ability to attract and retain employers. “I visited an assembly plant, and they told us that within five years every person at the plant would need to have at least an associate degree,” Moore says. The state is also pushing for more people to enroll in community college. Sinclair prefers ease of use
“Before SAS, our internal research group had to rely on IT to write custom applications to extract data,’’ Konsdorf says. “With other vendors, we couldn’t scale it out or deploy to the entire enterprise. Other products just helped us look at what happened -- not what is going to happen.” Sinclair is so pleased with its SAS experience that the college has a long list of plans -- which include performing predictive analytics -- that they believe will take them to “the next level.” “I don’t think there is any end to what you can achieve with SAS,’’ Moore says.Copyright © SAS Institute Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
Karl Konsdorf
Analytics and Reporting Manager Sinclair Community College
Challenge:
Sinclair Community College needed to improve enrollment and retention; market more effectively; and help struggling students graduate.
Solution:
SAS empowers the college’s Business Intelligence Competency Center, which was established to be the school’s single source of data-driven decision making. The enterprisewide initiative supports more than 50 departments to analyze data gathered by the college’s ERP system. College officials have built statistical models that help them understand which students are most likely to enroll, be successful or drop out.
Benefits:
Using SAS to analyze student data, the college was able to turn a possible 14 percent enrollment drop into a 1 percent enrollment increase in a matter of weeks – an improvement of nearly 15 percent. “No other software has the power and capability to provide us the insights that we get from SAS.” Karl Konsdorf Analytics and Reporting Manager Read more:
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