EFQA Research Seminar Series with Aysu Ozel
Thursday, October 8, 2026 · 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM EDT
Burruss Building, 560 Parliament Garden Way NW, Kennesaw, GA 30144 · Kennesaw, GA
About this event
Assistant Professor of Quantitative Analysis Department of Economics, Finance and Quantitative Analysis Title: "The Value of Modeling Enrollment Dynamics in School District Design" Description: How can school districts plan as student enrollment changes over time? This talk explores the value of incorporating multi-year enrollment projections and uncertainty into optimization models that support long-term school district design decisions. Research Abstract: Public school district design decisions, such as opening and closing schools and determining attendance boundaries, are long-term commitments that are difficult to reverse. Yet, student enrollment levels shift from year to year, and enrollment shifts are inherently uncertain. Large enrollment shifts can cause overcrowding or underutilization. Over the years, advances in optimization modeling have significantly improved decision-making in school district design, yet current practice typically relies on static enrollment estimates or, infrequently, deterministic multi-year projections. A natural question arises: what are the costs and benefits of further advancing school district design optimization by explicitly modeling uncertainty? Informed by school district practices, we develop a framework to explore this question. We formulate a series of optimization models whose treatment of enrollment dynamics progressively increases in sophistication from static point estimates to deterministic projections to probabilistic scenarios. We compare these approaches via a comprehensive computational study with district geographies and enrollment trajectories derived from historical data across a range of district sizes, locales, and enrollment trends. Given the nature of enrollment dynamics and the timeframe of design decisions, incorporating multi-year deterministic projections tends to consistently produce large benefits, with relatively limited additional gains from including probabilistic scenarios concentrated primarily in districts experiencing enrollment growth. Growing districts with sufficient resources can use stochastic optimization to alleviate the negative educational and financial impacts of overcrowding by incorporating uncertainty through a modest set of scenarios. For districts facing enrollment declines, deriving marginal value from stochastic optimization requires sophisticated probabilistic scenario generation beyond observed practical capabilities. If budgetary limitations prevent investing in the level of technical expertise required for stochastic modeling, as is likely for districts with declining enrollment, incorporating standard deterministic projections (which districts periodically generate for general planning purposes) can provide substantial improvements over a typical static approach.
Event details
- Date and time
- Thursday, October 8, 2026 · 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM EDT
- Venue
- Burruss Building, 560 Parliament Garden Way NW, Kennesaw, GA 30144 · Kennesaw, GA
- Category
- Education
- Cost
- Cost not stated
- Age guidance
- Age guidance not specified
- Format
- In person
- Last verified
- October 7, 2026
Accessibility
Wheelchair: Not stated
Assistive Listening: Not stated
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