Mark Riddle

Background

About Mark Riddle

You presented your problem to the analytics team, and an analyst applied some technique that he (it’s always he in this scenario) learned in his course on Udemy—probably LASSO or random forest, maybe whatever his eye landed on upon opening his Python cheat sheet. A week later he handed you a graphic and told you, ‘You now have everything you need to make a good decision.’ I’ve seen his work. He probably told you that if students rack up 120 units in their first eight semesters of college, they stand an excellent chance of graduating within the next two years. Oh, and maybe you should do more selective recruiting, because it looks as if members of some races graduate at higher percentages than others.We don’t need more people with analytics certificates. We need people whose passion for storytelling motivated them to take their statistics courses seriously. People who understand higher ed, the behavior of humans, the limits of data. People who will take the time to understand the intricacies of your problem before applying the appropriate statistical technique, not just choose one that results in a PowerPoint-worthy graph. Someone who knows how to interpret the error terms, the explained variance, and who can distill all that into a message you can bring to policy discussion.We need discernment, not flash. Interpretation is everything.