Via: Illuminating Academic Pathways at Scale

ABSTRACT: The processes through which course selections accumulate into college pathways in US higher education is poorly instrumented for observation at scale. We offer an analytic toolkit, called Via, which transforms commonly available enrollment data into formal graphs that are amenable to interactive visualizations and computational exploration. The tool is intended for a variety of stakeholders: college students, instructors, and administrators. We explain the procedures required to project the enrollment records onto graphs, and then demonstrate the toolkit utilizing eighteen years of enrollment data at a large private research university. We show that resulting findings complement prior research on higher education.