We are setting up our data warehouse and curious what some of the most used Dashboards are in Higher Education around areas such as but not limited to Student Retention, Admissions, and Giving.
Hi Lindsay - Thanks for your question, and sorry for such a delayed response.
I know that one dashboard that both SPU and UW use is an enrollment dashboard that shows student headcount (or FTE) over the years based on quarter, split by whatever dimension the user would like. This is insightful for demographic analysis, program/college size, and overall enrollment. The top half shows stacked totals with the given dimension on color, and the bottom half has the dimension and timeline on columns so the user can see each segment's change over the years.
We've also added a secondary breakdown, so a user could, say, use 'Class Code' as the primary dimension, see changes over the years, then further break the classes into gender distribution, to evaluate whether demographics are changing in any given class over time.
To allow for size disparities, we've included a control to allow 'count students' versus '% of students', thus, a user could still see the change in, say, Native American male vs female (small total), compared to Asian male vs female (large total).
Another popular dashboard on our campus is course fill rates, a nice visual way of keeping track of which courses are full, waitlisted, under-capacity, etc.
