TTU Working To Develop Database To Strategize Enrollment Recruitment

Tennessee Tech working to develop a database that will help the university align recruitment to population growth areas of state.

Executive Director of Strategic Planning & Data Dewayne Wright said they are in the early stages of collecting different sets of data from THEC, the state data center, and internal data. He said all of that data will help Tech to analyze where its recruitment efforts are against where populations are now and where the state thinks the traditional college-age population will grow in the future.

“We want to make sure we are doing the best we can with what we have,” Wright said. “So developing things like this database, that will shorten the amount of time to do a data analysis and that will then make us more efficient.”

Wright said things like county profiles provide information like how many high school graduates come from that county and the most popular colleges among those individuals. He said from that, they can look and see a county where Tech already has a reputation and where it needs to build one.

“So if we see that there is a county that we have a large reputation in, but its population is going to be going down, but a county will be going up, we need to start putting our efforts in building a reputation in that county,” Wright said. “Because that’s where the prospective students will be.”

Wright said they plan on using the state’s data center projections through 2040. He said current projections place most of the state’s population growth in Davidson County and neighboring counties, which is where the largest student presence comes from.

Wright said the process to create the database is still early on. He said the rough timeline to complete the database is next summer.