Dear Reader,
Recently, my youngest child started kindergarten. While many would regard the occasion as cause for celebration, my wife and I took it pretty hard. For the past twelve years we've had at least one pre-school-aged LaRusso running around our house, which apparently kept us too busy to consider that this day would eventually come. When it did, it came with a thud. The first morning my son got on the school bus was particularly tough on us. I'll admit there was a lot of hysterical crying, interrupted by wails of "I'm losing my baby!" (My wife didn't handle it well, either.)

We both started feeling a little better, though, when my son brought home this hand-written note from his teacher:

Dear Mr. and Mrs. LaRusso,
Thank you for entrusting your child to me for the coming school year. I want to assure you that I will do everything I can to make sure he comes home with a smile on his face and that he has a successful year. I look forward to the many "firsts" we'll experience together and to being your child's guide during the first year of his educational journey.

That convinced us that he had a thoughtful teacher, but before we could be totally at ease, we needed to check in with our son. Yes, he said, he had learned a lot that first day. Then he added, unprompted, that he loved his new school and that his teacher was a lot of fun. A teacher who cared about her students, coupled with a positive review from our son? Perhaps we'd be OK after all.

At SAS Education, we also depend on feedback to make sure we're delivering a quality educational experience. After every public class, we ask students to rate us on a number of categories, including the quality of their instructor, the design of the course, even the training center's break room. While these evaluations help us assess the quality of an individual course, twice a year we take a moment to review these evaluations in aggregate. Here are some of the results from our latest six-month review.

Like my son, our students think their instructors are pretty neat. When asked to rate the quality of their course's instructor, 96.6 percent of students said the instructor met or exceeded their expectations. We were gratified, but not surprised by the high marks. SAS instructors are recognized both for their outstanding teaching skills and for their standing as thought-leaders in their area of instruction.

As for the learning experience, our students gave us top marks as well. In fact, 96.4 percent say the course met or exceeded their expectations while 96.5 percent said the same for the course content and organization. These ratings reflect our commitment to offering focused, relevant courses that help you get the most out of your software and enhance your professional skills.

Finally, our students were equally impressed by our state-of-the-art training facilities. While they didn't go on and on about the automatic paper towel dispensers in the bathrooms like my son did, nearly 98 percent of our students said our training center met or exceeded their expectations.

So when you begin to feel the tug of advancing your education as the weather turns cooler, we hope you'll consider taking a course with us. Our past students can attest to the quality learning experience they encountered when training with SAS. We're certain you'll enjoy a similar experience. And if you get a chance, don't forget to call Mom and Dad and let them know you had a good day – we wouldn't want them to worry.

We hope to see you in a class real soon.

Larry LaRusso
Editor, SAS Training Report