Industry · Colleges & universities
Admissions funnel and yield, first-to-second-year retention, credit-hour production, tuition discount rate and alumni giving — joined to the same student and term dimensions instead of living in six exports. A senior US-based engineer builds it on Banner, Colleague, Workday Student or Slate. Most builds land in 3–5 business days.
Representative dashboard — sample data
One view of the institution
An institution is unusually good at collecting data and unusually bad at agreeing on it. Admissions tracks the funnel in its CRM, the registrar owns the census file, financial aid packages in a separate module, the business office holds the revenue, and advancement runs its own database entirely. Each office is right within its own system. The trouble starts when a cabinet meeting needs one number and gets five, each defensible, none reconciled — and someone spends a week rebuilding a deck to explain the difference.
We fix the definitions once, in a governed model, so the headcount an enrollment management dean sees on Tuesday is the same figure institutional research uses in a board report and the same figure that ties back to what was submitted federally. Nothing is re-keyed. Nobody has to defend which spreadsheet is current. Running a K–12 district instead? That is a different buyer, a different system stack and a different reporting regime — start with our Power BI dashboards for school districts page instead.
What we build for institutions
Buy a block of prepaid Flex hours and, if you're unhappy within the first 4 hours, we refund you in full — no questions asked. Hours are deducted only for work you've reviewed and approved, there's no project minimum, and your banked hours never expire.
Why institutions call us
You send the request; a senior engineer maps your student system, admissions CRM, aid module and advancement database into one model built for how an academic year actually runs.
Inquiries, applications, completes, admits, deposits and melt, tracked day-over-cycle rather than at a single snapshot, so a deposit shortfall in March is visible while there is still a campaign left to run against it.
First-to-second-year retention, term-to-term persistence and four- and six-year completion, broken out by entry cohort, college, program, residency and aid band, so the conversation moves from which students left to which groups keep leaving.
Gross tuition and fees, institutional grant aid and the resulting discount rate modelled together, so leadership can see what an incoming class is actually worth per student rather than celebrating a headcount that was bought with aid.
Student credit hours by department, section fill rate against capacity, and under-enrolled sections flagged early enough that a chair can consolidate or cancel while students still have room to re-register.
Applications filed, verification status, awards packaged and accepted, and unmet need by cohort, so the aid office and enrollment management are working from the same queue instead of trading exports twice a week.
Row-level security by college, department, program or advising caseload, so a dean sees their own unit, the provost sees the institution, and student-level detail stops circulating as attachments nobody can recall.
Four families of data. Recruitment: inquiries, applications, decisions and deposits from the admissions CRM. Academic: the student record, term registrations, course sections, grades, degree progress and awarded credentials. Financial: tuition and fee charges, institutional and external aid, and the revenue those produce. Advancement: constituents, gifts, pledges and appeal response. The model joins them on student, term, program and fiscal year, which is what makes a per-student or per-program figure possible at all. Advancement is usually the fussiest of the four to extract — if yours runs on Blackbaud, the routes, throttles and gift-split traps are set out on our Raiser’s Edge NXT Power BI dashboard page.
The hard part is agreement, not visuals. Is a student counted at the census date or as of today? Does a full-time equivalent divide by twelve credits or fifteen, and does that change for graduate students? Do dual-enrolled high schoolers belong in the undergraduate cohort? Does a stop-out who returns in the spring break persistence or restore it? We settle those choices once, as documented DAX measures (opens in new tab) — DAX being the calculation language Power BI models are written in — rather than as formulas typed into individual charts, so no two reports can quietly disagree. Our Power BI data modeling and DAX service covers how that layer is built, on a star schema (opens in new tab) the way Microsoft recommends.
Every institution weights these differently, and your mission and sector decide some of it: a regional comprehensive watches yield and discount rate, a community college watches credit-hour production and term-to-term persistence. The set below is where we usually start — the funnel, the student body, outcomes, the money, and the giving that follows graduation — with the systems each figure typically comes from.
| Metric | What it answers | Typical source |
|---|---|---|
| Admissions funnel and yield | How applications, admits and deposits compare to the same day last cycle | Admissions CRM such as Slate, joined to the student system |
| Summer melt | How many deposited students never register in the fall | CRM deposit records matched to term registration |
| Headcount and FTE enrollment | Who is enrolled at census, by level, program, load and residency | Student information system registration and census snapshots |
| First-to-second-year retention | Which entering cohorts return, and which groups do not | Cohort definitions applied to term-over-term registration history |
| Term-to-term persistence | Whether students are continuing, stopping out or transferring away | Registration history, optionally matched to clearinghouse returns |
| Four- and six-year graduation rates | How each cohort completes against normal and extended time | Cohort tracking plus conferred-degree records |
| Credit-hour production | Student credit hours generated by department and modality | Section registrations in the student system |
| Course fill rate | Which sections are over capacity and which should be consolidated | Course catalog capacity against current registrations |
| Net tuition revenue | Gross tuition and fees less institutional grant aid, per student | Student accounts receivable joined to the aid module |
| Tuition discount rate | What share of gross tuition is funded by institutional aid | Institutional grant aid over gross tuition and fee charges |
| Financial aid packaging progress | Applications filed, verified, packaged, accepted and unmet need | Financial aid module and federal aid application records |
| Advancement and alumni giving | Gifts, pledges, alumni participation and appeal performance | Advancement or donor database, matched to alumni records |
The student information system is the anchor. Ellucian Banner and Colleague cover most of the institutions that call us, with Workday Student, Jenzabar and Anthology close behind, and the extraction route depends on the product and your licensing: a reportable operational data store, a hosted warehouse the vendor already populates, a documented API, or a scheduled extract you can rely on. We establish which of those your agreement actually allows before designing around it, and confirm the method — and any vendor charge for data access — in the scope estimate, because in this sector reporting access is often a separately licensed module rather than an included feature. Institutions on Banner will find those routes compared in detail — the Operational Data Store and its reporting views, the Enterprise Data Warehouse and its point-in-time census snapshots, a read-only account against the Oracle tables, and the Ethos Integration APIs — on our Ellucian Banner Power BI dashboard page, which covers the extraction side this page deliberately leaves alone. Institutions that take enrollment records from feeder districts — dual-enrollment and early-college programs are the usual case — meet PowerSchool SIS on the other side of that exchange, and our PowerSchool Power BI dashboard page covers the routes out of it and the enrollment, attendance, GPA and behavior grain they return. Institutions that also run Workday for staff and faculty employment data can reuse the same extraction pattern for workforce reporting — our Workday Power BI dashboard page covers faculty and staff headcount, turnover and open requisitions from the HCM side of the tenant.
| System | Examples | What it contributes |
|---|---|---|
| Student information system | Ellucian Banner, Ellucian Colleague, Workday Student, Jenzabar, Anthology | Enrollment, registration, cohorts, grades, degrees conferred |
| Admissions CRM | Slate | Inquiries, applications, decisions, deposits and funnel stage dates |
| Financial aid | The aid module of your student system | Packaging status, institutional and external awards, unmet need |
| Finance and student accounts | Your ERP or finance system | Tuition and fee charges, departmental budget, net revenue |
| Learning management system | Canvas, Blackboard | Course activity and early-alert signals for retention work |
| Advancement | Your donor or alumni database | Gifts, pledges, alumni participation and appeal response |
Institutions with long registration histories get incremental refresh (opens in new tab), which Microsoft documents, so each nightly run processes only what changed instead of reloading a decade of term-level detail every night. Where a figure must be frozen — census counts, an official cohort — we snapshot it in the model rather than recalculating history, so a number published last October still reads the same next October.
Through row-level security in the model. Each account maps to a college, department, program or advising caseload, and every visual filters to that scope automatically. It is enforced by the model rather than by which file someone was sent, so a dean opening the report sees their own unit, the provost sees the institution, and student-level detail never leaves as an attachment that outlives the person who asked for it.
Microsoft documents the mechanism in its guide to row-level security in Power BI (opens in new tab), and our own walkthrough of a Power BI row-level security setup shows the roles and test steps in detail. It matters more here than in most sectors, because education records carry obligations under FERPA — the US Department of Education's Student Privacy Policy Office (opens in new tab) is the authoritative reference. Those obligations stay with the institution; what we do is build to the access rules your registrar and privacy officer set, test the roles against real accounts before go-live, and document who can see what.
It feeds both without replacing either. Federal reporting through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (opens in new tab), runs on a fixed calendar of collection windows, and its components — fall enrollment, completions, graduation rates, student financial aid, human resources, finance — are built from records your institution already keeps. When those same definitions live in the model, institutional research sees the figures continuously rather than assembling them under deadline, and can reconcile what the dashboard shows to what was actually keyed and locked.
Accreditation self-study is the same argument with a longer horizon. A visiting team asks for multi-year evidence of student achievement and of the institution's own use of data, and a governed model with frozen cohort snapshots produces that far more credibly than a folder of spreadsheets whose provenance nobody can reconstruct. To be clear about scope: this is a management reporting tool, not a compliance system. It does not submit anything on your behalf, and we do not provide accreditation, financial aid or regulatory advice. When the same numbers have to reach a board of trustees on a fixed monthly or quarterly cadence, the format work — a consistent pack, stable period definitions, a version trustees can open on a tablet — is covered on our Power BI dashboard for board reporting page.
You buy prepaid Flex hours that never expire, with senior hourly work from $100: Starter is 20 hours ($2,500), Growth is 40 hours ($4,600), and Power is 80 hours ($8,000). Nothing starts before you approve a scope estimate, so the build is priced up front rather than billed open-ended — which is what makes it purchasable against a departmental line item rather than a procurement project. A first funnel, enrollment and retention dashboard on a single student system usually fits inside the Starter block.
Adding financial aid packaging, net tuition revenue and multi-year cohort trends generally moves an institution to the second tier, because that is where the aid module and prior-year census files have to be reconciled rather than simply loaded. There are no project minimums, and hours are deducted only for work you have reviewed. That structure suits an academic calendar: bank hours once, then spend them when the cabinet asks a new question in February or when the fall census closes in September. See how prepaid Flex hours work, including the published tiers.
Small and mid-sized colleges and universities — roughly the range where institutional research is one to three people who spend their year assembling reports by hand, and a full data engineering team is not in the budget. It fits IR and effectiveness offices, enrollment management and admissions leaders watching a cycle in flight, provosts and deans who want credit-hour and completion data without filing a ticket, registrars, financial aid directors, chief business officers who need net tuition revenue rather than headcount, and advancement teams tracking alumni participation. Community colleges, independent colleges and multi-campus systems on one student system all fit the same pattern.
Two nearby cases are worth separating. A public K–12 system reports on an entirely different regime and buys through a different office — that build lives on our Power BI dashboards for school districts page. And an independent foundation or education charity funded principally by contributions, with no enrolled student body at all, has a giving-and-grants reporting problem rather than an enrollment one; start with Power BI dashboards for nonprofits. If you would rather see the shape of the output before talking specifics, our Power BI dashboard examples gallery shows how these views are laid out across industries. Contact is form-only — send your request and we'll reply with a scope estimate.
business days, typical
hours, never expire
own everything
Bank hours once and spend them as each term raises a new question. See Flex pricing →
How it works
Tell us your student information system, whether admissions runs in a separate CRM, and which questions go unanswered today. We reply with a scope estimate and the hours needed before any work begins, including how we would extract your registration and funnel data.
A senior US-based engineer joins students, terms, programs and the fiscal year into one model, writes the DAX for yield, retention, credit hours and discount rate, configures college-level security, and reconciles the totals to your own census file — typically 3–5 business days.
We publish to your Power BI workspace, set nightly or incremental refresh, snapshot the census figures that must stay frozen, and hand over the model and credentials. You own everything; we keep the refresh healthy and add views from your banked hours as the year progresses.
Representative perspective
Admissions, the registrar and the business office each had a headcount they could defend, and none of them matched. Putting all three on one model meant the cabinet stopped debating the number and started debating what to do about it.Director of institutional research, private university
Representative perspective
Watching the funnel against the same day last cycle instead of at a monthly snapshot changed when we acted. We moved the yield campaign forward by six weeks because we could finally see the deposit gap opening.Vice president for enrollment management, regional college
Tell us your student information system and whether admissions runs in a separate CRM. We'll scope the task and tell you the hours before any work begins — drawn from prepaid Flex hours that never expire, with no project minimums and no obligation.
FAQ
Any system that exposes a reportable database, an operational data store, an API or a dependable scheduled extract. Ellucian Banner and Colleague, Workday Student, Jenzabar and Anthology are the platforms we see most, alongside Slate for admissions and Canvas or Blackboard for course activity. We confirm the extraction route in the scope estimate before hours are used.
With your institution's cohort rules, written once as documented measures. Retention normally means returning to your institution, persistence means continuing anywhere, and the federal graduation rate follows a first-time full-time cohort to 150 percent of normal time. Your census date, cohort exclusions and part-time treatment are yours to confirm, not ours to assume.
No. Your IPEDS keyholder process and your accreditation self-study stay exactly where they are. The dashboard reads the same underlying records so institutional research can see the figures continuously instead of at each collection window, reconcile them to what was submitted, and catch a coding problem while it is still correctable.
Yes. Row-level security maps each signed-in user to a college, department, program or role, and every visual filters automatically. Student-level detail stays inside the model rather than circulating as emailed spreadsheets. FERPA obligations remain the institution's, and we build to the access rules your registrar and privacy officer set.
Most requests are delivered within three to five business days of your approval, and a first enrollment, retention and admissions funnel dashboard usually fits inside one prepaid block. Flex hours never expire: Starter is 20 hours ($2,500), Growth 40 hours ($4,600), and Power 80 hours ($8,000), with senior hourly work from $100.
Book a free demo
Tell us the task. We scope it, you approve, and a senior consultant delivers — typically in 3–5 business days. Prepaid hours that never expire.
The fastest way to reach us is the form — tell us the task and we'll reply within one business day.