Infographic: How One Small School Improved Student Retention

Here's how Paul Smith's College in upstate New York went about improving student retention:

Paul Smiths College and Student Retention | Create infographics

-Caitlin Garrett, Statistical Analyst at Rapid Insight

We'd love to hear about your strategies for tackling retention - what works, what doesn't, and what you'd like to try. Please feel free to share your perspective in the comments section :)

Customer Tips: Roundup Edition

Here are a few extra tips for a roundup edition of our Customer Tips series to get your new year off to a good start!

Sometimes it's helpful in an analysis to recode variables, like recoding a binary variable for retention to a binary variable for attrition. 

- Jean Constable, Director of Institutional Research at Texas Lutheran University

Problem: a new input file every two weeks needs to be processed by the same job time after time.

Solution: Use a generic file name for the file in the input node. Copy the weekly input file to the generic file name and run the job. This works as long as the input files have an identical format. 

- William Anderson, CIO at Saint Michael's College

If you throw a filter between your input and the merge even if not populated when you change the input file, you do not lose the merge connections or fields!
-Loralyn Taylor, Registrar Director of Institutional Research at Paul Smith's College

Customer Tips From... Dr. Loralyn Taylor (Paul Smith's College)

Our new customer tips series will feature tips from customers on using either of our software applications. Each entry will focus on one customer’s ideas to make your lives easier.

We’re kicking things off with Dr. Loralyn Taylor, from Paul Smith’s College. Dr. Taylor is a one-woman IR office and Registrar and is constantly looking for ways to save time when creating reports and executing jobs. Here are her five tips:

1.  Take the time to rename your nodes so that you can easily follow your line of thought as you move through the job.
2. Remember that there are multiple ways of doing things. The shortest is not always the best – to me it is often more important to be able to easily follow my thought on how I am working through the problem than to do it elegantly in the fewest number of nodes.
3. Common problems to check for: data format incompatibility (just use a convert node), and sometimes a null is not actually a null (just because something looks blank doesn’t mean that it is).
4. Remember that creating a job is like solving a puzzle; you have to think about it and play with it.
5. I often have to run jobs many times to get them right. Helpful tip: Set up a test data output that you can move around to different parts of the job to see how your data is coming through at different points when you are troubleshooting. 

...Have tips of your own? Email them to caitlin.garrett@rapidinsightinc.com!