Using data to find and eliminate section bottlenecks

It’s no secret that students unable to get into high-demand courses are less likely to graduate on time. Many institutions struggle to identify and manage these “bottleneck” courses, however, because the relevant data is scattered across the institution.

To address this issue, progressive institutions are building dashboard tools to help chairs quickly triage bottlenecks and open new sections during registration.

Western Washington University (WWU), a public master's institution, has exploited its existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to create an easily comprehensible dashboard to tackle its bottleneck problem at low cost. In addition to reducing course access problems, they also saved faculty and chairs countless hours in low-value waitlist management tasks.