Student Success

EAB Combines Student Success Tech in Unified Platform

• By Rhea Kelly
• 07/05/17

EAB today introduced the Student Success Management System (SSMS), a new enterprise platform for helping guide students toward graduation and employment goals. The new offering unifies EAB's analytics, workflow and communications technologies in order to give faculty, administrators, advisers and other student support staff a single system for managing and improving student outcomes.

"After studying student success for 10 years, we have seen it evolve from an isolated issue to an existential challenge that affects every aspect of an institution, and every institution across the selectivity spectrum," explained Ed Venit, senior director of strategic research at EAB, in a statement. "And it has become clear that everyone on campus needs to be able to collaborate and innovate in order to achieve our aspirations for students' experiences and outcomes. The SSMS is an enterprise architecture that facilitates this coordinated and proactive approach to student success management."

A few of SSMS's features, as described in a news announcement:

• A mobile application provides students with personalized assistance designed to help them manage their time and make better decisions; explore careers and majors; connect with advisers and other campus resources; meet deadlines for campus services; and navigate complex college requirements.
• Advisers can access real-time student engagement data and a customized predictive model to find, support and track students at risk of dropping out. In addition, a cross-campus referral system allows them to connect students to tutoring centers, financial aid offices and other campus services.
• Administrators can identify courses with high failure rates that are preventing large numbers of students from graduating, as well as services that are helping improve student success.

"With the help of analytics and applications that are now a part of the SSMS, Georgia State has made a lot of progress for our students in a short period of time," said Tim Renick, vice president for enrollment management and student success at Georgia State University, in a statement. "Over the last five years, our advisers had more than 200,000 analytics-based interventions with students; introduced smart-texting to deliver personalized alerts in real-time to students; and integrated financial, career and academic counseling to provide more seamless support for our students. As a result, we not only graduated thousands of additional students, we shaved more than half a semester off the average time to degree, saving students $15 million annually in tuition and fees."

For more information, visit the EAB site.