Category: Uncategorized

A Data-Informed Approach to Student Retention

Few institutions are performing sophisticated predictive modeling on factors affecting student retention, and given how many factors there are (both within and outside the institution’s control), predictive modeling can appear quite daunting. But you don’t have to go from A to Z all at once. “Typically,” Jim Scannell, president of Scannell & Kurz Inc, advises, “we encourage institutions not to leap into predictive modeling immediately. Start by doing univariate analysis, collecting descriptive knowledge.” For example, out of an entire class, you could set out to describe: How many men retain versus women? How many men versus women achieved higher than a 3.0 GPA? How did your transfer students from two-year institutions perform versus your transfer students from four-year institutions? Students from public versus private high schools? Student cohorts based on race? Suppose you find that men in that class are, on average, achieving a lower GPA than women. Can you dig deeper? For example, if you have strong athletics, compare both the academic preparation of entering athletes versus non-athletes and the academic success of those two groups during the first year. Do you have a lower GPA for male students because you enrolled 100 football players who were less academically […]

Data-Informed Recruitment and Enrollment

Moving beyond high school GPA and standardized test scores, you will want to look for predictors of student success and affinity for your institution by analyzing data on your past and current students at each stage of their relationship with your institution. Identify shared characteristics of those students who model behaviors you want to encourage. Look for shared characteristics among: Prospects who apply (versus prospects who don’t) Admits who enroll Students who take leadership roles Students who perform high academically Students who persist into the second year Students who graduate within a certain time range Students who stay engaged with the institution after graduation and take leadership roles in the alumni community Once you know the characteristics of your current, most successful students, these characteristics become additional attributes that you can identify in your recruiting process. Suppose that your data indicates that a significant percentage of the students who show high academic performance and persistence in your engineering program took calculus prior to entering it—and you find that many of these are transfer students who completed calculus while enrolled at a local community college. With this knowledge, you can look to your applicant pool and identify applicants who have taken […]

Success Leaves Clues: Predictive Modeling in Higher Education

by Amit Mrig

Included in This Report: October 2012. Given increasing competition, shifts in student enrollment, and reduced resource levels, it’s critical that colleges and universities recruit and retain the students who are most likely to succeed at their institutions. By reviewing data on current and past students and alumni, and engaging in predictive modeling, you can identify not only the factors that impede desired outcomes such as yield, student retention, and alumni engagement and giving rates, but also the positive factors that contribute to those outcomes. In this edition, we have turned to institutional researchers, enrollment managers, and advancement professionals to highlight examples of predictive indicators and data-informed tactics for enrolling and supporting the right students and helping them transition into engaged, committed alumni. We hope their advice will be helpful to you. Read the report. See Other Topics in Institutional & Academic Planning

Mining Your Data: From Students to Alumni

Your institution has enrolled a strong class of students, and a high percentage of them have persisted and are thriving academically. Now it is the senior year. In a few months, these students will graduate, and, if you do not engage them proactively now, you will lose your best opportunity to invite them to engage with you and give back to the institution as alumni. A few figures to consider: According to Eduventures’ 2008 study Transitioning Donors to Higher Gift Levels, almost half of all donors make their first gift to the institution more than 20 years before making a contribution at the major gift level. According to the 2011 Capgemini and Merrill Lynch World Wealth Report, 32%—nearly a third—of high net-worth individuals (HNWIs) in North America are under age 55, an increase in the number of the young wealthy over previous annual reports. These data speak to the importance of cultivating donors as early as possible. And as affinity with your institution develops while alumni are still students, managing the student-to-alumni transition is especially critical. Key Indicators of Giving and Engagement What can you learn about preparing students to become engaged alumni, based on the data you have (or […]

DFW Rates and You: Rethinking Support for At-Risk Students

In a recent interview with Academic Impressions, Bernadette Jungblut, West Virginia University’s director of assessment and retention, noted with some dismay that too frequently institutions have used data on individual courses’ D/fail/withdraw rates primarily as a means of performance evaluation for faculty, rather than partnering with faculty in taking a closer look at the DFW rates for clues to identify specific challenges students are having. Jungblut suggests that historical and current DFW is a particularly effective indicator that can be used to inform proactive rather than punitive action. Indeed, many institutions have begun identifying students taking courses with high DFW rates as “at risk.” On one level, this is a useful move — if it prompts both faculty and those charged with student retention to monitor real-time, operational data on students in those courses closely. But this is only a preliminary move, taking a “broad brush stroke” approach to tracking the students taking these courses. With a limited amount of digging into student data, it’s possible to take a much more sophisticated and effective approach to identifying and supporting at-risk students in high-DFW courses. Jungblut offers these ideas. Taking a Closer Look at Your Data Have you looked at your […]

When a Crisis Occurs: The President as Spokesperson

At a recent Chicago-area panel of crisis communications experts – a panel attended by media relations professionals from local higher education, government, and business entities – one of the top five questions presented to the experts was: When should your president serve as a spokesperson during a crisis, rather than your chief communications officer? We reached out to one of the panelists for an in-depth answer. The panelist is crisis communications expert Cindy Lawson, the vice president for public relations and communications at DePaul University. Lawson offers the following advice. Interview with Cindy Lawson AI. Under what circumstances should the president or chancellor serve directly as the spokesperson versus the chief communications officer? Cindy Lawson. Crises are defining moments, and therefore, the choice of chief spokesperson is crucial.  As much as I might want to offer a clear-cut answer to this question, the reality is that the circumstances surrounding every crisis is different.  There are times when the president/chancellor is the best spokesperson.  There also are times when the chief communications is the best choice, and, to be sure,  there are still other times when subject experts may be the best choice. Some guidelines to consider when opting to have […]

Targeting Your Social Media Content

In a 2011 interview with Academic Impressions, Brad Ward, CEO of BlueFuego Inc., cited his organization’s research into the impact of university Facebook pages. After a 25-month study of nearly 400,000 Facebook updates across more than 1,200 university Facebook pages, Ward concluded that most institutions offer too much content via social media channels, leading to declines in engagement as their audiences begin to “tune them out.” Ward warns that quality is far more important than quantity, because institutions compete with family and friends for time and social media “space” — in short, for the attention of students and alumni on channels that are already overcrowded with content. It’s critical that marketing and communications and alumni relations offices invest more in listening to their audience’s social media preferences and preferred content. Effective listening can empower your office to offer highly targeted content — whether on your website, on your Facebook page, or via a mobile app. In a follow-up article in June 2011, we turned to Linda Thomas Brooks, president of Ingenuity Media, The Martin Group and past member of the board of directors for the Ohio State University Alumni Association. With considerable expertise in setting up effective social media listening posts, Brooks […]

Prospecting Using Social Media: Getting Started

Marianne Pelletier, CFRE, the director of research and data support for Cornell University and author of the recent Academic Impressions monograph Prospecting Using Social Media, has embarked on some extensive experimentation with integrating social media into prospecting and prospect research. We interviewed her this week to ask why prospect researchers need to be moving on this quickly, and to ask what myths about social media and prospecting might stand in need of debunking. There are advancement shops that have made some early strides in this, and a few that have been using social media in prospecting for a while. This article is for those shops that are at the earliest stage or are considering it. GET A THOROUGH PRIMER ON USING SOCIAL MEDIA FOR PROSPECT RESEARCH This Academic Impressions monograph by Marianne Pelletier, CFRE, will walk you through more than 30 separate exercises in using social media for prospecting and for prospect research, and will provide you with introductory information on the following: The possibilities and limits of using social media in prospecting Tactics for mining social media to locate wealthy prospects, with walkthroughs of specific steps and examples How social media activity can reveal assets among your prospect pool […]

Showcase: Examples of Mobile Technology Used for Teaching and Learning

With students bringing smartphones and tablets to campus — and expecting to access information and course content via mobile devices — it continues to be urgent for faculty developers and instructional technologists to explore the affordances of these devices and the opportunities for using them to enhance teaching and learning. In our past article, “Piloting Mobile Learning,” we offered a review of how to pursue a pilot project effectively. Today’s article offers a brief summary of the most critical affordances of mobile devices and a showcase of examples from Boise State University’s mLearning Scholars program. The program is part of the university’s Mobile Learning Initiative, “a multi-year project to identify and support key uses of mobile technology that will impact the ways we teach and learn,” and mLearning Scholars supports two cohorts of faculty in exploring these questions. One cohort consists of faculty making their first forays into mobile learning; the second cohort consists of faculty with some degree of fluency in mobile technologies, who are now addressing very targeted research questions. We turned to Dale Pike, director of academic technologies at Boise State University and a lead thinker on the adoption of mobile technologies in the classroom. We asked […]

Seeing Success in Space Optimization

In a July 2012 survey of facilities managers in higher education, Academic Impressions found that 73% of facilities managers cite optimizing space utilization as either “high priority” or “highest priority” among initiatives for the next year. When asked about challenges faced in achieving this, facilities managers expressed concern over buy-in, both from senior leadership (for prioritizing space needs) and from the rest of the campus (in implementing a space utilization initiative). It is no surprise that space use is often a political issue on college campuses, with many departments, both academic and administrative, vying for protection of “their” space. If a space optimization effort is to be successful, it will need both senior leadership and a commitment across the campus to shift the conversation from departmental ownership of space to institutional ownership of space. Leadership Buy-in For advice, we turned to a panel of experts that included Kambiz Khalili, the assistant vice chancellor for student affairs and the executive director of housing and dining services at the University of Colorado Boulder; Dan King, the assistant vice president for facilities at Auburn University; and Kathie Shafer, vice president for operations at Messiah College. This panel stressed that the two officials that […]