3 Ways Institutions Can Become Data-Driven Organizations

Faced with declining enrollments and changing demographics, colleges and universities must make use of data and analytics to better serve students.

• By Sam Burgio
• 01/21/25

With the anticipated higher education enrollment cliff fast approaching, institutions are competing for a declining number of traditional-age students who plan to attend college. As schools focus on retaining current students and attracting new ones, they should be thinking about how they can use the data available to them to gain a competitive advantage. If they haven't yet started the process, they need to.

1) Unlock the Value of Already Available Data

Schools have a wealth of data about students, ranging from financial histories to areas of study to the graduation rates in the most popular majors. That data has the potential be very valuable to schools but, in many cases, it remains inaccessible. It's often siloed and spread across different computer and storage systems. Often, because it has not been considered valuable, it has grown stagnant and has not been maintained.

As schools navigate the new and changing higher education landscape, accessing and effectively using data to make informed decisions has become critical. Fortunately, many institutions already possess large volumes of highly valuable data — they just need to gain access to it and clean it up.

When consolidated under one roof and effectively analyzed, an institution's data can shed light on their current student demographics, what existing learners are looking to achieve from higher education, and how the institution itself can make changes to meet those expectations. Because it is often more cost effective to retain a student than it is to enroll a new one, looking inward can provide colleges and universities unique insights into how they can maintain a healthy student population.

2) Cater to the New Student Population

When it comes to using data to attract new learners and understand the changing demographics of today's students, things can get a little trickier. For one thing, demographics are changing in several ways. The percentage of older students is growing, as is the number of learners whose higher education experience involves balancing school with work and home life. Additionally, today's younger workforce is also cycling through more careers than their parents did and may be looking to return to school and gain new skills. Using data to discern what these learners want isn't necessarily straightforward.

To identify and better serve these students, institutions need to ask: Which programs are being taken most by various student demographics? Are there certain times that classes are more highly attended or registered? Are these classes in-person on campus, fully online, or hybrid?

Understanding how learners tick, especially as the traditional student demographic changes in age and where they are in their professional career, can give colleges and universities in edge in attracting those students and meeting their needs. This will grow increasingly important as the overall population of learners potentially declines.

3) CIOs: Be Champions for Data Usage

To become truly data-driven, CIOs and executive leadership teams must champion plans to break down data silos and centralize data. The CIO needs to be an evangelist and a leader in showing departments across the campus how using data benefits everyone.

More specifically, higher ed CIOs must carefully examine the platforms they use to collect student and faculty data. Is that data collection seamless or are there issues? Can their systems be improved with automation or technologies with more user-friendly experiences?

Part of that data collection process should include obtaining information directly from students; knowing what learners want is the first step to serving them. Student surveys can provide some of this information, but schools can also collect feedback via other channels, such as texts, emails, and interactions with chatbots. (Chatbots specifically can also be used to gauge student sentiment.)

As one of the core champions for becoming a data-driven organization, higher education CIOs need to be able to pack and present the data in a way that enables everyone on campus to understand how they can use the data to better serve students. Visualization tools that turn complex data into dashboards can help data champions share insights that lead to insightful actions.

Good Data Management Unlocks the Future

Just like hygiene is important for our health and well-being, so too is it critical for data's effectiveness and strength. We only need to look at other industries to get a sense of how fastidious they are about collecting, analyzing, and using data to better serve customers. Those endcaps at the grocery store and Walmart? Those are only created after the organization makes sense of its user traffic and buying patterns. The same logic can and should be applied to higher education. Why not use academic, demographic, and other data to make a more appealing campus that keeps students coming back for more?

Institutions competing for students' attention should think of students as consumers and use the information they already possess to better serve students. Unlocking the insights from already existing data, collecting and analyzing information on the next wave of students, and having a strong champion to leverage technology to enable data-informed decision-making will be what powers institutions to successfully navigate the future.