Case Study: George Mason University achieves faster decision-making and increased student success with SAS Viya cloud analytics from SAS

George Mason University relies on SAS® Viya® to uncover insights to improve operational effectiveness and increase student success

George Mason University, Virginia’s largest public research university (34,000 students, 1,400 faculty), struggled with fragmented data sources, desktop sharing of sensitive files, and no common decision-support platform. Institutional researchers needed a unified way to combine reporting, visualization, statistical and predictive analytics while ensuring accessibility, confidentiality and the ability to scale.

By deploying the SAS Platform with SAS Viya in the cloud—adding SAS Visual Analytics and SAS Visual Statistics—the university stood up a secure, unified analytics environment quickly (in weeks), with easy scaling and self-service access. The result is faster implementation, improved data security and accessibility, broader stakeholder use across campus, and actionable insights (for example, internships and work experience emerged as key predictors of graduate employment outcomes).

George Mason University

Thulasi Kumar

Associate Provost, Office of Institutional Research and Effectiveness