University Enrollment Funnel Analysis

📌 The Problem

Guilford College was experiencing enrollment challenges but lacked a systematic, data-driven understanding of where prospective students were dropping off in the admissions funnel. Were they losing students at outreach? At application? At acceptance? At enrollment?

The admissions team had intuitions. I had data. The goal was to turn intuitions into evidence and evidence into action.

🏗️ What I Built

• Queried and cleaned 3+ years of historical admissions data using SQL and Excel, creating a unified dataset tracking each prospect through the full funnel
• Built interactive Tableau dashboards that visualized conversion rates at each stage, broken down by geography, program, and outreach channel
• Identified that two specific funnel stages accounted for 68% of lost prospects — giving the admissions team a clear, prioritized place to focus
• Presented findings to the Board of Trustees and senior leadership using plain-language narratives alongside the visualizations
• Worked cross-functionally with admissions, financial aid, and student success teams to validate findings and align on recommendations

📊 Outcomes

🛠️ Technologies Used

💡 Key Learnings

• The most important slide in an executive presentation is often the one that says "here's the one thing to fix first" — decision-makers need prioritization, not comprehensiveness
• Data quality is an upstream problem — no amount of analysis fixes bad source data, so data validation has to be step one
• Cross-functional buy-in before the presentation is just as important as the presentation itself; people adopt insights they helped shape