data dashboard

Chicago community college taps big data to measure ROI


One of the nation’s largest community colleges builds data analytics capacity to support student success.

Harper College, one of the nation’s largest community colleges, announced today a partnership with Civitas Learning designed to identify the practices and policies to best support its 35,000 students from enrollment to graduation.

Civitas Learning will power the College’s new student success initiatives, supported by the federal Title III Strengthening Institutions grant program. Starting this semester, Harper College will launch a new series of initiatives that integrate holistic assessments, student advising, early warning systems, and academic interventions to ensure that all students receive individualized support throughout their academic career. The insights generated by the Civitas Learning platform will allow administrators to analyze data from across the institution to better understand the impact of these initiatives, making it easier to deploy the most effective interventions to students in need.

“Real-time, predictive analytics and the ability to better analyze complex trends are powerful tools to better understand the barriers our students face and what actions can be taken to optimize student success,” said Patrick Bauer, Chief Information Officer at Harper College. “We are excited about our partnership with Civitas and look forward to leveraging the best in data science modeling.”

In addition to generating institution-wide insights, Civitas Learning applications will provide advisors with individualized profiles for each student to better understand each student’s strengths and areas of improvement to increase the quality of outreach and mediation.

“Behind every piece of data is a student with unique dreams and aspirations. By combining information from disparate and often disconnected data sets across campus, we can deliver the right information at the right time to help students reach those goals,” said Dr. Mark Milliron, co-founder and Chief Learning Officer of Civitas Learning. “We saw that philosophy clearly demonstrated in Harper College’s new student success initiatives, and we’re excited to support their work.”

Harper College joins a host of other grant recipients who have partnered with Civitas Learning to improve their student success efforts. For example, by leveraging the insights from a combination of Civitas Learning solutions to redesign advising and counseling around guided pathways, Austin Community College has seen an increase of retention by 7.3 percentage points. At the University of Central Oklahoma, administrators, faculty, and advisors use the insights surfaced to bolster student agency and non-cognitive aspects of learning.

Material from a press release was used in this report.

Sign up for our newsletter

Newsletter: Innovations in K12 Education
By submitting your information, you agree to our Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

Oops! We could not locate your form.

Sign up for our newsletter

Newsletter: Innovations in K12 Education
By submitting your information, you agree to our Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.