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Organizations across varied segments have access to data – customer data, transactional data, financial data, etc. Whether these segments are successfully leveraging data to make smarter business decisions or improve internal processes is another discussion.
One industry that has loads of data but has historically been slow to leverage it is higher education. High school students across the world are required to fill out applications to attend an institution of higher learning. They submit high school transcripts, test scores, personal essays and letters of recommendation. They share their parents' financial information to determine if they are eligible for governmental aid or federal grants. They interact with university recruiters and do on-site visits to identify the school that best suits them. Once admitted, these students receive mid-term grades, full-term grades, declare majors, change majors, change schools, and attend for anywhere from two to four years. Data is everywhere, and that's just the beginning. Grades and classrooms aren't everything – they have meal plans, play intra-mural sports, acquire on-campus jobs and off-campus internships, participate in student government …the list goes on and on.
It's easy to see how this ‘picture' or ‘profile' of each student becomes unique and complex and how students would benefit from a personalized higher education plan to be admitted and to succeed.
Universities can gain insights by blending various data sources together to better understand student profiles or segments and running analytics on the data. An easy place for a university to start leveraging data is in the student admissions or student recruitment area. Student recruitment is an important part of the student lifecycle, especially when you consider that student tuition payments make or break the university's bottom line. Targeting and recruiting the right student, one who has high potential to be successful through graduation, demonstrates academic rigor, and is likely to accept your financial aid package and offer to attend, is a huge priority for any higher education institution. The types of data that could help with these enrollment questions could be standardized test scores; demographic, economic and social data; financial aid data; or even social media data.
Download our new visual white paper, "Faster Insights for Higher Education with Data Blending", to learn more about how universities can blend of these data sources together to profile existing successful students and leverage those profiles to recruit students who exhibit similar characteristics, giving you the ability to target each student segment appropriately, with the right message and the right medium.
Stay tuned for next week's blog, where I'll discuss how Alteryx helps improve student retention. In the meantime, check out our Education Analytics Soultion.
