major/minor table Clean up suggestion

Marion Breen

Our Major/Minor table is growing and growing with all the new curriculum changes and additions our academic divisions send us. So now when someone goes to run a query, they have to run up and down the thousand of majors to find, for example, all of the education related majors (i.e. elementary education, secondary education, reading specialist, curriculum & instruction and so forth, not to mention all the various endorsements and certificates they are now offering too). We've attempted to make them a little more simple to find on the table/list when someone needs to run a query or report by using the this format on the major table: Department: Major (i.e. Education: Elementary Education, or Education: Secondary Education, etc). The academics use Ellucian and they send us an excel workbook/sheets that we import each graduation to Raiser's Edge so we do a little data scrambling at least twice a year. I don't mind the import process so much as I do having to figure out how to keep the integrity of the data they send us and whether we have to change things in Raiser's Edge to conform. Anyone else have a similar issue and how they are resolving it?

Dariel Dixon

@Marion Breen I struggled with this a bit when I worked in Higher Ed. There are times when a major change is material and when it is not. For instance, one of the majors we had changed from Marine Science to Marine Biology. I didn't think it was a big deal and was about to use the table cleanup tool to merge them all, but was informed of the difference. In other cases, it's more trivial and just a change of verbiage. In those cases, table cleanup is your friend. I merged a lot of those majors if I could.

I also tried to inactivate any retired majors whenever I could. That helped with the list display being so long.

Marion Breen

@Dariel DixonThanks so much for the feedback. Adding it to my file for the next dept. data meeting. Much obliged!