December 16, 2008 - Dickinson College is accurately measuring student enrollment, financial aid allocation, diversity, class size and a host of other critical operational variables using data analysis and integration applications from Rapid Insight Inc.
The Pennsylvania school is using Rapid Insight Analytics and Data Integration software to accelerate data collection and understanding, enabling administrators to make ad hoc and long-term business decisions.
"Accuracy is absolutely critical when analyzing student enrollment against the average tuition each student will pay, financial aid included," said Mike Johnson, director of institutional research at Dickinson College. "If we miss that calculation, called the discount rate, by as little as one percent, we're talking about a half million dollars. Rapid Insight Analytics and Data Integration allow us to look at more data in more ways to get a more precise view of these figures so we can strike the right balance."
Dickinson uses Data Integration to pull data from different departments stored on different servers into one repository. "Data Integration gives me transparent sourcing, allowing me to access all of my systems including Banner, Cognos and Recruitment Plus," said Johnson. His team uses the software's graphical interface to drag and drop icons and use arrows to connect the data sources to a host of functions such as: merge, filter, cleanse, aggregate, de-dupe, flatten, append, sort and rename.
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