The central Florida region, faced with record tourism, a large service population, and significant population growth over the next few decades, must rely on a community-based institution of higher education with lifelong learning offerings, a local community college, to create world class public safety education and training for the region.…

Excessive course attrition is costly to both the student and the institution. While most institutions have systems to quantify and report the numbers, far less attention is typically paid to each student's reason(s) for withdrawal. In this case study, text analytics was used to analyze a large set of open-ended written comments in which students…