Analysis-Ready Report: Identify Institutions To Which Students Transfer (7 minutes)
Use the analysis-ready report to identify institutions to which students transfer.
If you’d like to follow along, you can use the StudentTracker 3.0 Analysis-Ready Report Sample (csv). It’s the same sample file used in the video.
This session is intended for secondary institutions active with StudentTracker 3.0.
Resources
- StudentTracker 3.0 Web Page (General Information)
Transcript
A portion of your students may transfer from one institution to another between the first and second year after high school. This is called persistence. Knowing the schools to which your high school students persist, or transfer, can be insightful. Let’s create a report to identify the most common persistence schools for your students. To begin, create a pivot table. With the ARR workbook open on the ARR tab, select Insert and then Pivot Table. Make sure the New Worksheet is selected, and then select OK. Click and drag Persisted_In_Second_Year to Filters and filter on Y. This will allow you to view only students who transferred to a different institution for their second year. Then click and drag Second_Year_College_Name to Rows and Your_Unique_Identifier to Values. Right click the pivot table, hover over Sort and select the Largest to Smallest sort option. This will provide you with a list of the most common schools at which your students persist in their second year after high school. If desired, you can also filter on high school name by clicking and dragging High_School_Name to Filters and filtering as desired. Now let’s discuss your Retention and Persistence KPI dashboard. Within this KPI, and under View Transfer Behavior, you can see counts of students who enrolled during the first year at each institution type and where they transferred to during the second year. Let’s say you want to know which of your students fall into each area of this chart. For instance, you want to find the students who started their first year at a 4-year public institution and were retained (or stayed enrolled) at a 4-year public. Scroll to filter on column AG, First Year 2- / 4-Year. Select the arrow but make sure only 4-year is selected. Then filter on Column AH so only public is selected. Now scroll to column AQ to determine which students were retained. If you filter column AQ so only Y is selected, you will see a list of your students who started year 1 at a 4-year public institution and were retained for their second year at the same 4-year public institution. Alternatively, you can see those students who started their first year at a 4-year public but were not retained and instead persisted at a different institution for their second year. First, you may want to clear your filters, which you can do by navigating to the top ribbon, Select Sort & Filter, and selecting Clear from the drop down menu. This will clear all filters, so that all of your data is visible again. Start by filtering column AG for 4-Year only and column AH for public only. Then scroll to column AR to select Y to display only those students who decided to attend a different institution for their second year, or persisted. Now you can see those students who were enrolled during the first year and second year, but whose first year and second year institutions differ. Depending on how large your student population is, this may be enough information. Hower, if you are with a larger organization, you may want more information about where your students are leaving after their first year and transferring to in their second year. To do that, we can create a pivot table. Highlight the data, select Insert, then Pivot Table, then From Table/Range and, finally, select OK. First, click and drag both First_Year_College_Name and Persisted_In_Second_Year to Filters. Then click and drag Second_Year_College_Name to Rows, and Your_Unique_Identifier to Values. Now choose a first year institution, perhaps a common first year institution attended by your students. Filter First_Year_College_Name for this institution. For this example, I’ll select River State Tech as the first Year institution. The list of schools that appears below are all second year schools at which those students persisted. In other words, 6 students who began their first year at River State Tech persisted to Sunset University in the second year. One student who began at River State Tech persisted at Ocean State, and another student persisted at Sand Dune State. The same approach can be used for those students who started their first year at say, Sunset University. One student persisted from Sunset University to River State Tech, and one student persisted from Sunset University to Ocean State. Perhaps you want a holistic view of where your students began in Year 1 and where they attended in Year 2. First, clear this pivot table by navigating to PivotTable Analyze in the ribbon at the top and selecting Clear and then Clear all. Click and drag First Year College Name to rows, Second Year college Name to columns, and Your Unique Identifier to Values. Now let’s focus on the students who were enrolled during the first year and second year. Filter both Row Labels and Column Labels to remove blanks. This table is very wide, so be careful when interpreting it. The list of institutions on the left are your students’ first year institutions. The schools across the top are the second year institutions. So, in this table, I can see that 6 of my students started at River State Tech and, for the second year, attended Sunset University. This concludes our tutorial on how to identify institutions to which students transfer . Keep in mind that there are many more ways to analyze the information in your ARR. Watch our other tutorials to learn more.
