Higher Education orgs: querying on historical alumni data

Rachael Walker 3 · March 2020

Good morning all,

We are currently grappling with a query/data hygiene issue that I'd love to get some feedback on. Our university has five colleges currently. Education records are coded with degree, major, and the college associated with said degree/major (which goes into the "School Type" field on the education record). In addition, we import the college/"School Type" as a constituent attribute labeled "Preferred College," something left over from our previous database (Banner). (Note: we converted to Raiser's Edge just over a year ago.)

We are now running into the question of what to do with historical alumni data where majors have moved from one college to another, or belonged to a now-defunct college. This is an issue any time we want to group alumni by their associated college: for assigning portfolios to our DOs, for annual giving segmenting, for querying purposes.

Examples:

Our College of Fine and Performing Arts is relatively young, but many of the majors within it have existed for a long time. A music major from 1980 would have a preferred college of "College of Arts and Sciences," because this is where the major used to reside. A music major from this year would have a preferred college of "College of Fine and Performing Arts." If we are asked to report on all CFPA alumni, do we include those majors that used to be in CAS but would now appear in CFPA?
The College of Applied Sciences is now defunct. The majors within it were split into what are today's College of Engineering and Technology and College of Arts and Sciences. Anyone who graduated from the College of Applied Sciences has that as their preferred college - meaning they would not show up in any queries for CET or CAS, regardless of where their major would currently live today.
We used to have a degree in Home Economics. It has not been offered for almost 40 years. The college to which it belonged is now defunct, and there is no modern major equivalent - leaving them essentially college-less.

I would love any input from anyone on how you have handled these situations in your universities. It seems obvious to me that we can no longer rely on the Preferred College attribute, but I am not exactly certain where to go from there to get our arms around this. The people who handled reporting for us when we were still on Banner are no longer with the University and not reachable, so in all honesty I don't even know how we were doing this in Banner - whether we were querying by major or by college, and if we had some kind of SQL code table on the back end we were using to organize that. In any case it's not something we have accessible to us now!

Thanks in advance.

Rachael

Dariel Dixon 2 · March 2020

I would query on college for certain purposes, and query on major for others. Obviously, a music major from 1980 would have no affinity for the college of fine and performing arts, but will probably have more affinity for the major, or the old defunct college. Querying on major will grab those constituents regardless of the college.

Alan French · April 2020

We have a similar issue, having recently restructured from 8 faculties down to 5. So far I've only got around to cleaning up the faculty field and haven't yet touched the schools/departments, but I've moved the old faculty name to an attribute on the education relationship in case we need it in future, and then changed the faculty to wherever it sits in the current structure (N.B. we have the UK version of RE so we might have different fields in the education module than you do - we don't have the major/minor fields)

Cameron Alzubi 3 · June 2020

We are a STEM school, with similarly named colleges and scenarios, and so we have many thousands of alumni who earned a degree under a college name that has been modified and/or dissolved since they graduated.

When grouping together people who may have the same major, but earned the degrees under different schools, that should not be an issue because the major and minor table are independent of school type and/or whether or not an education record is primary. You can query across majors -- someone else mentioned that as well.

The most common way to record the old name of a this is to use an education relationship attribute called 'Historical ______' This way, even if the degree they earned 20 years ago was under a college that has changed its name, or has been dissolved entirely, you can still group together those alumni when needed in that context. You can even export that attribute description when needed, i.e. name tags with alumni info.

Higher Education orgs: querying on historical alumni data

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