Tableau Goes to College with Institutional Research

Over the last year, we at Tableau have noticed an interesting group of early adopters of our visualization software: Institutional Researchers at universities and colleges. You probably never heard of these folks while you were in school, but they’re the ones who figure out everything from the average SAT score of a school to when to schedule classes.

Bill Tobin, head of Institutional Research at DePauw University, has long been doing interesting data analysis with Tableau. For example, want to know when the peak times for Arts & Humanities courses are? Between 10 am and noon. Math majors get out of bed earlier; the peak time for Math & Sciences classes is just before 10 am.

Here's one of Bill's visualizations:

Bill also uses Tableau to create a “truly strategic planning document” for DePauw and to cut down on the time he had spent reporting on student data.

One of the characteristics of people who work in universities is that they tend to like to share information, and we’re hoping others will use Bill’s work as a launching point for their own. For that reason, we’ve written up some of Bill’s work in a case study. He’s also done a webinar on Institutional Research.

We're glad Bill and Depauw find Tableau useful in their mission. Go Tigers!