To that end, here are three examples of broader questions institutional analytics can answer through visibility into the connections between enrollment, student success and institutional financial data.
Question #1: Are we recruiting the students that are likely to be most successful at our institution?
Why it’s a pressing question: Beyond “are we recruiting enough students,” institutions need to continue to make the tough decisions about whether they are recruiting the right students to combat the mounting pressure of meeting short term enrollment and revenue goals. By connecting student outcomes to admissions and recruitment variables, institutions can see if new recruitment strategies impact retention, for example whether an augmented financial aid policy promotes initial enrollment, but leads to lower retention among those students. Making these connections will also give recruitment teams new ways to segment and prioritize marketing, outreach, and follow up activities.
Question #2: What are my degree completion patterns, and how do we improve time to degree?
Why it’s a pressing question: Driven by the push to get more students to graduate, many institutions are looking for new ways to support student success. But, limiting data evaluation to grades or persistence rates ignores key aspects of data such as admissions profiles, tuition payment history, residential life, co-curricular participation and services received. By linking together information from across the institution and student experience, leaders will be in a better position to reevaluate the impact of student services, interventions, and incentives offered to students to keep them on track.
Question #3: How can we segment students into subpopulations to better understand and serve them?
Why it’s a pressing question: As institutions look to improve areas such as accessibility and diversity, they require a deeper level of knowledge about what different students need to succeed. As opposed to looking at the student body as a whole, institutions may potentially see improved student outcomes through segmentation to create distinct populations of students that have very different goals, circumstances and propensities to complete. Getting to that point will take seeing across an institution’s full set of data to understand which supports are most effective for which students, what commonly holds different students back, and how institutions can change their current offerings.
As higher education institutions develop their analytics maturity, they can cultivate practices to impact students’ individual experiences across their lifetime relationship with their college or university. From considering whether to apply to an institution, to enrollment, to the first day of class, through graduation, and establishing an alumni relationship with an institution, analytics can help inform and shape those experiences to be the best they can be. But only if the full breadth of institutional analytics are considered.
Jack Neill is vice president of Client Services at HelioCampus (formerly Senior Director of Analytics at UMUC).
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