Open Source Analytics for College Success

About the event:

Join us for an in-depth conversation with Jared Knowles, President of Civilytics Consulting. Jared has implemented world-class data science applications for multiple school districts and public postsecondary systems. His work focuses on creating sustainable analytics for public organizations, from systems that predict student success in college gateway courses to identifying academically-prepared students of color for recruitment by Pennsylvania Higher Education, to developing dashboards for the Tableau Racial Equity Data Hub.

Jared’s work has been central to the Harvard Strategic Data Project’s Open SDP toolkit, a project to create open-source tools for analyzing patterns and trends along the education pipeline, from high school graduation, to seamless college transition, to college enrollment, and persistence in college. Originally conceived as a tool for use by school districts, the OpenSDP toolkit may prove a valuable analytical resource, an exemplar of collaborative work, and analytics community for College Success organizations as well. 

About the speaker:
Dr. Jared Knowles formerly served as a research analyst with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction. There he led the design and deployment of the Wisconsin Dropout Early Warning System (DEWS), a machine learning predictive framework available to all schools serving students grades 5-9 in the state. He also led several internal analysis efforts culminating in presenting findings to agency leadership, legislators, school leaders, teachers, and the public. He completed his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015. He was also a fellow in the Interdisciplinary Training Program in Education Sciences, an Institute of Education Sciences pre-doctoral training program at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. Jared is currently the president of Civilytics Consulting, LLC. He founded Civilytics in 2016 to pursue his passion for providing high-quality public performance metrics for government services. He provides an array of consulting services including statistical computing, research design, and data analysis, and R programming training. He has expertise in machine learning, multilevel modeling, and other statistical analysis methods.