Retention

PAR Framework, Starfish Retention Partner To Identify At-Risk Students

• By Joshua Bolkan
• 12/19/14

PAR Framework has partnered with Starfish Retention Solutions to integrate its Predictions of Academic Risk services with the Starfish Enterprise Success Platform.

The Enterprise Success Platform is designed to help students accomplish their goals by identifying at-risk students in real time via their coursework and faculty feedback. The platform then connects those students to appropriate resources and monitors the effect of interventions.

The PAR (for Predictive Analytics Reporting) Framework is a nonprofit organization that provides analytics as a service. "The PAR Framework offers educational stakeholders a unique multi-institutional perspective for examining dimensions of student success" designed to help improve retention, according to information released by the organization. PAR offers predictive models, collaborative benchmarks, frameworks and links to interventions and services.

The University of North Dakota (UND) worked with the organizations on the integration in an effort to help "counselors, coaches and advisors prioritize students and allocate staff resources to the students who will most benefit from interventions," according to a news release.

"We joined PAR Framework because of PAR's strong commitment to student success. We appreciate PAR's transparency and the responsiveness of PAR's core professional staff when it came to meeting our needs," said Joshua Riedy, vice provost and chief strategy officer at University of North Dakota, in a prepared statement. "PAR has already helped us transform the targeted delivery of interventions for students identified as 'at risk' through PAR's predictive models. Working with PAR, and leveraging the Starfish platform, will further enhance the efforts of counselors, coaches and advisors who are actively using Starfish at UND. We are now on track to measure the effectiveness of this integration as early as the first half of 2015."