Admissions & Recruitment

In an increasingly 'tuition driven' market, private institutions are under tremendous pressure to conserve precious resources by more efficiently recruiting 'successful' students from a competitive and often wider market area. GIS as a proactive decision-making tool can enable admission's to better utilize the finite personnel and fiscal resources available by identifying those geographic areas and prospective students with the greatest potential for being admitted and entering your institution.

Example:  Case Study of Private Higher Education

Bus Routing/Transportation Optimization

By placing students on a street network (a process called "geocoding") using their address at enrollment, you can get a 'spatial' sense of your student body and their disbursement throughout the district. Residential areas require different transportation solutions than apartment complexes and visa versa. To optimize the costs of the school district you want to accommodate the students' needs (students who walk versus those who ride) while minimizing transportation costs. GIS is able to solve this problem by allocating the students to a specified route based on school attendance zones, grade level, and proximity - maximizing the route by filling each bus route at or near capacity while accommodating the special circumstances that exist in all school districts (this road is undriveable, that complex is served by two stops versus one, etc.).

Example:  Bus Routing in a School District

Enrollment Database Applications

The real power of GIS lies in its ability to integrate existing technologies, specifically relational database management systems (RDBMS), with locational attributes of a specified geographical extent. Through this integration process it is possible, with just the students address and grade to instantly provide a school of attendance, a bus stop, a bus route, and if manageable or appropriate - a classroom and a teacher - while maximizing the resources and expenses of the school district.

Enrollment Projections

Enrollment projections, a type of local area population projection, are an invaluable tool for managing district growth. For each step of the enrollment management and planning process, projections play an integral role in decision making. Projections are a versatile mechanism for issues such as deciding: whether a new facility (or consolidate several) is warranted, which site(s) is most appropriate to locate, given existing facilities and changing student demand, or how to adapt a transportation system to accommodate the changing demographics and spatial patterns of student enrollment.

More Information

Market Area Analysis

Reaching the desired consumer can be a daunting task. While most entities have worked to make a quality product or service, they often lack both the skills and resources to effectively market them to the consumer. Through the spatial analysis and decision making capabilities of GIS, important market areas questions can be answered and effective decisions made as how to best reach the customer. Consider the following:

• Market Area Delineation: How large is my market area?
• Market Profiling: Who are my customers and what are they like?
• Market Segmentation and Saturation: Which demographic am I capturing in the market area and what proportion uses my product or service?
• Market Potential: What is the potential in my market for increasing revenue?

Example:  Locating an Optimal New Site for an Expanding Business
Example:  Assessing Market Share

Redistricting: Government

Most municipalities and counties are mandated with the task to equalize their respective populations for representation. Be it wards, council districts, representative or senate districts, equal populations are required. In today's increasingly mobile society, this task becomes more and more difficult. Redistricting can be a very 'politicized' and contentious process which frequently ends up in our court system. GIS can solve many of these disputes before they evolve by eliminating partisan ship and allocating representative districts based on the fairest aggregation of populations. GIS can accommodate various 'models' and definitions (compactness, communities of interest) while easily keeping count of the various segments (partisan, ethnic, etc.) through many iterations of the modification process.

Example:  City of O'Fallon, Illinois

Redistricting: School Districts

With a society that continues to thrive on mobility comes an increase in the migratory rates of our student bodies. Whether districts are experiencing an influx of students as families in-migrate to thriving areas, or are declining as older established neighborhoods are abandoned for newer suburban communities, proper decision making and planning are paramount to maximize the limited resources available to a school district. Whether new facilities or additions are added to accommodate growth or consolidation is necessary to absorb surrounding communities, districts are burdened with the task of enrollment management. Frequently this can be achieved through a redistricting or reapportionment of the student body by moving the attendance zone boundaries within the school district to match the student demand with the available resources or classroom space. GIS is an integrating tool, when applied with the appropriate methodology and geographical subfield can provide the decision-making support and solutions that districts need.

Example:  Riverview Gardens School District

Site Selection

Thinking about expanding your operations or just finding a location to begin? Several factors must be considered that affect both the actual building 'site' and the geographic 'situation'.

• What suitably zoned parcels are available and at what size or cost?
• Will I have access to water or sewer lines and road networks?
• What is the best location given the market that I serve?
• How much of the market will I capture and will it produce enough revenue for me to survive?
• What will be the effect of 'competitors' at that location?
• To what extent will my branch office cannibalize my main store?

These are but a few of the questions that can be answered when using a GIS for site selection.

Example:  Locating a Miniature Golf Course

© 2003 Spatial Analytics, Inc.