The Massachusetts Institute for Social and Economic Research (MISER) is an interdisciplinary research institute of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at UMass Amherst. MISER has been conducting school enrollment forecasts since 1983. Since then, we have produced over 1,000 forecasts for a variety of schools, agencies, private architectural firms and building planners. The application implements an enrollment forecasting model developed by Professor Stephen Coelen, Director of MISER.

    Our school enrollment forecasting services help schools and towns/cities better understand the impact of trends and changes in enrollment, migration, and births on school population. By forecasting enrollments for 10 years into the future, schools and towns/cities are better able to plan for capital improvements, sufficient teacher workforce, and other budgeting needs. Typical users would be school superintendents, school committees, or others doing long range planning and budgeting at the local, regional, and state levels. Our model uses individual school report (ISR) and/or school attending children (SAC) enrollment data along with birth numbers to produce forecasts.

    Additionally, with this application, we can develop and compare "scenarios" to examine the effect of actual, proposed, or anticipated changes in the school and town/city. Because the model separates the components of Retention, Migration, Persistence, and Births, you are able to see the effect of changes to school enrollments when we make adjustments to these components. Thus, for example, if you believe that more families/students will enter the school due to a new housing project or railroad stop (thereby increasing migration), or that more students will leave the school through school choice (thereby decreasing retention), we can modify specific numbers in these matrices and see the effect over time on school population. In this way you are able to see how different hypotheses about changes in the community might effect school enrollment.
 
 

Reports generated by MISER have the following subsections:

• School Enrollment by Grade and Year – including historical data and the projected 10-year forecast.
• Persistence Rates by Grade and Year – an overall rate at which students persist from a given grade one school year to the next grade in the following year taking into account migration and retention patterns.
• Migration Rates – a measure of the annual migration of students into and out of the given district or city/town.
• Retention Rates by Grade and Year – a measure of the tendency of students to progress from their current grade to the next grade in the following year excluding migration.
• Figures and Charts – providing a visual display of pertinent data.
• Explanatory Material – helpful for reading and interpreting findings.