Dive Brief:
- Understanding and implementing big data into retention strategies makes for cost-effective, comprehensive approaches to keeping and graduating students.
- Pairing data points of student achievement with student behavior can help enrollment and student affairs professionals tailor student intervention and experience strategies that get results.
- Collaboration between student affairs, institutional research and IT is an essential component to making analytics a long-term retention strategy.
Dive Insight:
Big data can yield a lot of positive outcomes for student recruitment and retention with unlimited possibilities that are so accessible, they can easily cross into privacy infringement. But finding the right system and the right people to manage it is key in using the data with strategy and compassion in mind.
Officials must be careful to remember that a data trend illustrated in analytics doesn't tell the full story of each student's experience or struggle. It can, however, yield valuable insights about student engagement with specific curiculum, learning technology and campus resources, in order to understand where attention and finance are best spent on an annual, or even semester basis.