Gaining Acceptance

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Recruiting & Retention Technology

Gaining Acceptance

9/1/2007

By Matt Villano

At URI, school officials set up a warning system to alert them to online survey responses from freshmen having transition problems.

‘Mining’ for Students

More and more, schools are turning to data mining to improve the way they handle recruitment, admissions, enrollment, and retention. To wit: The University of Alabama. In 2003, when the university announced a plan to grow enrollment to 28,000 students from 20,000, school officials knew they needed to increase the size of freshman classes and keep more of those students enrolled through matriculation. Cali Davis, associate director for data analysis and specialized recruitment, was put in charge, and she turned to a number of solutions, including predictive analytics from SAS, to help the university achieve its goals.

Today, the school uses the Enterprise Miner tool from SAS to find out which prospective applicants are most likely to want to attend the university. Davis captures data on college preference, financial aid and scholarship awards, ACT and SAT scores, and in- or out-of-state residency status. This information helps the data analysis pro segment students in a variety of ways, including by state or region, so that the school can find out how best to market itself in a particular area (geographical region or demographic). Focus-group testing helps confirm what Davis’s analytics reveal. The result: a 40 percent increase in the size of the freshman class over three years.

“Context is everything,” Davis says. “Were we a student’s first choice? Second choice? Were we a supplemental choice? Answering these questions can give us a sense of how much time and money we should be spending trying to recruit particular students so that we get a higher rate of return.”

At Florida State University, officials are using tools from tech vendor Business Objects to achieve similar results. There, to make the enrollment management effort more strategic, the school deployed a business intelligence solution that leverages data from disparate silos of information. Specifically, the matrix determines which students have the greatest probability of succeeding at the school, identifies applicants who need specific correspondence, analyzes course availability and demand, and provides workflow documents that enable officials to keep tabs on all aspects of the process.

Rick Burnette, director of student information management, says that in addition to demystifying the process of data mining, the $200,000 solution has provided school officials with a valuable strategy for factoring in up to 20 variables including rank in class, test scores, and extracurricular activities.