Mentor: Dr. Afsaneh Doryab

Client:  McNeese State University

Description: 
Having a college degree has been linked to greater lifetime earnings, but the benefits are not limited to salaries.  College degrees correlate with increased financial security, lower rates of crime, and better health outcomes, lower rates of disability, longer lives, and a host of other benefits.  Unfortunately, having a college degree is still a relative rarity – only about one-third of the United States population has completed a four-year degree.  As such, a majority of the population is at risk for economic, health, and legal burdens.  This population problem is also exacerbated by time constraints and infrastructure – existing work and familial demands make travel to a campus difficult, families may not have the resources to afford additional transportation, etc.  These demands can be met through online education – asynchronous learning environments allow students to tailor their class loads to existing social and economic pressures.<br>
Some institutions have attempted to meet this need (e.g., the University of Phoenix and other for-profit institutions), but these institutions tend to be predatory or possess minimal (or no) accreditation.  There students tend to amass significant amounts of debt without a quality education to show for it.  As such, the goal would not be to match “in need” populations with for-profit institutions, but rather with established colleges and universities that are looking to grow their online enrollment (e.g., regional universities that primarily serve a local population, but are looking to expand).  The challenge is finding a “best-fit” for these students – what markets will respond well to online education and what programs will work well for the economic realities faced by potential students who may have the drive and desire to learn, but cannot afford the tuition of their local institutions.

Deliverables:
The purpose of the application is to provide McNeese State University with a visualization platform to make evidence-based decisions to market to new students using location data. We seek an application that consists of a middleware component that uses Python to scrape public data sources in order to load them into a database. There should be a separate extract-transform-load workflow to generate business intelligence using the scraped data and a rules-based system. This business intelligence should then be presented to the McNeese decision-makers, along with a GIS component using a Javascript framework. The application should be developed using the Agile methodology in accordance with industry best practices, such as a full-featured API that underpins the application as well as provides methods to perform RESTful operations on the data directly.  While this is an initial effort, the software should provide a minimal viable product (MVP) that lays the foundation for a complete system.  The proposed software would have ideally two functions.  First, identifying markets that would be receptive to online education recruitment.  Identifying populations and market segments that would benefit from increased access to online education are necessary to prevent the above economic, legal, and medical problems.  Second, identifying accredited and non-predatory online education providers that would be appropriate matches for economically-challenged populations (those institutions providing programs and courses at a lower cost than local colleges and universities).
Ideally, the software would offer a geographical representation responding to the intersection of multiple variables.  It would need to identify regions with the high cost of living and low to moderate educational attainment that also had a level of technological infrastructure which would support online learning.  The software would allow the user to establish minimum/maximum criteria for the above-identified criteria and then map the overlap, identifying cities and towns falling within these regions for targeted advertising.