Provide me a half page response to below discussion post.
Discussion:
To reiterate, my workplace is a College where I work in the admissions department. My daily objective is to enroll students into the school and help them through the enrollment process. Part of our daily activities is to forecast our expected enrollments each day, week and quarter. We in admissions can base our forecasts off of various components to determine accurate numbers.
I do think that using decomposition would be appropriate in my field. As I mentioned previously, there are many factors or components that can go into our forecasts. These factors can be based on season, the economic state, government funding/regulations and marketing efforts. Each of these components can increase or decrease demand for higher education by itself. So, if we were to focus on each component individually, we would be able to assess part of our forecast based upon each component. For example, if we look at the various seasons of the year. Our fall term always has a naturally higher number of students inquiring about school. Our summer term has the least. As a college we can better make our forecasts on that component alone, which will better prepare our college for a specific number of enrollments.
One challenge by using decomposition is that we may forget to take into consideration other factors. If we make our forecast off of just one of the components, say for example seasonal, we may miss another big component. Let's say our fall term is coming up and we forecast a high number of enrollments. However, the federal government has just cut student funding, which could result in higher expenses for students. If this is the case, then we just forecasted high enrollments because of the season, when in reality the forecast should be much lower due to the affect government funding will have on the enrollment numbers.
For longer term forecasting, I do think that decomposition would be applicable. This is the type of forecasting that would be done much higher up in the College than on the ground level of admissions. Directors and managers could plan long term for the college by studying certain components. Trend, government regulations and economic growth can be these components. If the state of the economy is getting better and is projected to get much better in the next 5 years, than as a college we can expect a steady decline in enrollments as the economy grows stronger. I also do think that the seasonally adjusted data would work. In my field, we can definitely see how the seasons affect student enrollments, so this would factor in nicely.