Case Study: Large U.S. University achieves discovery of an untapped high-yield student market and faster recruiting insights with Tableau Software

University Identifies Nearly Untapped Student Market with Tableau

A large Northeastern U.S. university faced the twin challenges of optimizing recruiting investments and speeding access to actionable insights across a complex, decentralized data environment. Recruiters relied on spreadsheets and infrequent reports—weekly Graduate School updates and little visibility into which out-of-state fairs actually yielded enrollments—making it hard to prioritize efforts or spot new markets as higher-education demographics shift.

The university adopted Tableau after a quick trial showed dashboards could be built in hours; about 30 authors now create visualizations for 100+ consumers and publish them via Tableau Server with Active Directory security, pulling data from SQL Server and Oracle. The results: recruiters now prioritize dollars toward higher-yield fairs, the Graduate School moved from weekly to daily insights with less effort (including mobile access), and a new, high-potential recruiting market was identified by combining internal and public data—helping the university prepare for tougher times ahead.