TENNAIR 2026

Approximately 80% of students in Tennessee's community colleges enroll in transfer programs, yet fewer than 30% successfully transfer to a four-year institution. Students who complete transfer degrees but do not go on to earn a bachelor's degree often face weak labor market outcomes, earning less, on average, than peers with other community college credentials. Improving outcomes for these students requires a clearer understanding of their enrollment decisions, program choices, and the institutional factors that shape their paths.

This presentation would share initial findings from TBR's Transfer Student Success project, an ongoing policy research initiative examining enrollment patterns and outcomes across Tennessee's transfer pathways, transfer barriers, and opportunities to improve student supports to improve transfer success. Drawing on TBR end-of-term data, the project explores how students move through, and between, these pathways, and how outcomes differ across programs, institutions, student populations, and geographies.

Attendees will be introduced to key findings from a series of Research Spotlights currently in development. Topics include: how University Parallel (UP) enrollment trends and student populations compare to those in Tennessee Transfer Pathways (TTPs); how often students switch between transfer and applied technical programs, and when those switches tend to occur; how transfer and bachelor's degree attainment rates differ across pathway types; and how students in applied technical programs navigate the leap to four-year institutions, including patterns in credit transferability and bachelor's degree program selection. Together, these spotlights offer a statewide picture of where Tennessee's transfer ecosystem is working well and where there are opportunities to improve current policies and practices.

In March, I gave a TENNAIR workshop showing Claude fix a broken script, recover from missing data, and generate a president's report from a CSV. Those demos were a slice of a larger system. This session shows the rest of it.

Union University does not have a formal IR office. I function as the institutional research and data infrastructure layer alongside our SACSCOC and assessment leadership. Over the past year, I have used AI coding tools to build a dimensional warehouse on top of Colleague (6.5M GL transactions, three dimensions, two facts), a nightly Slate-to-warehouse ETL feeding department chair reports, a weekly intelligence brief delivered to the Provost, and a library of on-prem Informer dashboards spanning enrollment, finance, and academic KPIs. I will walk through what shipped, what failed, and the governance discipline (source plus formula plus falsifier, verification before briefing) that keeps the output trustworthy. Attendees will leave with a realistic picture of what is achievable, what to avoid, and where to start.

As institutional research and data teams scale to meet increasing reporting needs, ensuring visual and analytical consistency becomes important. Without deliberate standardization, reports developed by multiple team members often differ in layout, naming conventions, and design - leading to confusion, misinterpretation, and diminished stakeholder trust. In this presentation we 1) share strategies for centralizing data transformation logic using a dataflow so that all report builders work from a common, governed data layer and 2) present a template-based design framework called SLAB (Scope, Layout, Aesthetics, Build), which provides reusable, standardized dashboard structures applicable across an entire reporting portfolio. Together, these approaches reduce development time, minimize inconsistency, and produce polished data products that stakeholders can more readily interpret and trust. While grounded in Power BI, the concepts are transferable to any BI platform.