APSU recipient of Best Paper Award for projecting enrollment growth through statistical analysis

Clockwise from the left are Dr. Rex Gandy, Dr. Andrew Luna, Sherry Kendrick, Daniel Kasper and Dr. Lynne Crosby.

(Posted May 12, 2020)

Five of Austin Peay State University’s administration and staff recently received the Southern Association of Institutional Research’s (SAIR) Best Paper Award. The award is given annually to a paper presented during SAIR’s conference in the fall.

Dr. Rex Gandy, provost; Dr. Lynne Crosby, vice provost and associate vice president for Academic Affairs; Dr. Andrew Luna, executive director, Decision Support and Institutional Research (DSIR); Sherry Kendrick, research analyst, DSIR; and Daniel Kasper, data scientist, DSIR, authored Enrollment Projection Using Markov Chains: Detecting “Leaky Pipes and the ‘Bulge in the Boa.’”

The article followed a statistical method for projecting enrollment growth based on the previous year’s enrollment numbers. Specifically, the article examined placing credit-hour production into six-hour groupings and determining which students within those groupings returned to APSU.

“This is quite an honor,” said Luna who has won the award two additional times since 2003. “SAIR represents 15 states and hundreds of public, private, and two- and four-year institutions, so the competition is usually strong.”

As part of the recognition, recipients of SAIR’s Best Paper Award are invited to present the paper at the national Association for Institutional Research’s annual conference during the spring. Due to the COVID-19 virus, the AIR Forum, scheduled for this month in New Orleans, has been canceled.

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