CEDAR
Open-source enrollment analytics for higher education
CEDAR helps colleges and universities understand their enrollment, curriculum, and student success data without expensive software licenses or subscriptions. It provides a common platform for data analytics teams to build together and manage their own individual needs. Built by academics for academics.
Get Started with the Dashboard I Want to Contribute
Why CEDAR?
Higher education institutions spend significant resources on enrollment analytics tools that often:
- Require expensive annual subscriptions
- Need extensive customization to match institutional needs
- Lock data into proprietary formats
- Provide features that go largely unused
CEDAR is different. It’s free, open-source, and designed specifically for the questions that chairs, deans, and institutional researchers actually ask:
- How is enrollment trending in my department?
- Who’s taking our courses?
- What’s our student-to-faculty ratio?
- Where do students go after taking this course?
Two Ways to Use CEDAR
For Dashboard Users
CEDAR’s web dashboard lets you quickly explore and visualize enrollment data, see who’s in courses, visualize curricular flows, and examine short and long term data trends.
For Developers
CEDAR is built on R, making it easy to extend and customize. The command line tools give you full control, and we welcome contributions. This is perfect for institutional researchers who want to verify calculations or add new functionality to the platform.
Built for Real Institutional Needs
CEDAR was developed at a research university to answer the questions that actually matter to academic units. It’s not trying to be everything—it’s focused on making common enrollment analyses quick and accessible.
What CEDAR Does Well
| Analysis | What You’ll Learn |
|---|---|
| Enrollment Trends | How is enrollment changing over time? |
| Student Demographics | Who’s taking our courses? What are their majors? |
| Course Pathways | Where do students go after this course? |
| Degree Production | How many graduates in each program? |
| Faculty Workload | Credit hours by instructor type |
| Registration Patterns | When do students register? How full are sections? |
What You’ll Need
CEDAR works with standard enrollment data that most institutions already have:
- Course section data (what’s being offered)
- Student enrollment records (who’s taking what)
- Program data (majors, minors)
- Degree data (graduates)
The current version is designed for Banner/MyReports data, but the data model is institution-agnostic. If you can export basic data into .csv or .xslx format, you can use CEDAR.
Open Source, Open Community
CEDAR is released under the MIT license. That means you can:
- Use it for free, forever
- Modify it to fit your needs
- Share your improvements with others
- Deploy it on your own servers
We believe higher education analytics shouldn’t be locked behind paywalls. If you find CEDAR useful, consider contributing—whether that’s code, documentation, bug reports, or just spreading the word.
Get Started
Dashboard Users: Head to the User Guide to learn how to explore your data.
Developers: Check out the Developer Guide for installation and contribution info.
Questions? Open an issue on GitHub or email fwgibbs@unm.edu.