Data Analytics
Knowledge You Need
Do you know the precise “financial break-even point” for newly acquired students (the number of courses when the revenue offsets the Learner Acquisition Cost)?
Do you know how academically successful persistence to this financial benchmark point correlates with retention to graduation?
Do you know if you should spend your next dollar on generating specific types of leads, improving your enrollment function, or improving your retention function?
Current Data Woes
Despite years of industry focus on reporting and analytics for higher education, only a small number of your peers could answer these three important questions.
Your Institutional Research unit already uses the shared IPEDS data definitions as the basis of many of the metrics and analysis currently conducted. The office also works with other organizations including the National Student Clearinghouse, regional accreditors, and program accreditors to determine other, sometimes competing, data definitions and metrics.
Institutional leaders, academic leaders, and operational managers all have separate but related needs tied to analyzing the data created and collected.
What Do You Really Know?
We think you should ask yourself the following questions:
Which of my questions go unanswered by the data and analytics we currently use?
Do I know how I can answer these questions?
What areas of my business are opaque given the existing tools at my disposal?
How many of the reports and metrics available in my organization are used?
How many of them provide information that I can act upon to change outcomes?
Our experience teaches that you are missing large pieces of the "whole picture" using your existing data infrastructure. Despite the large number of reports around the office, you look at only two or three, and they are mostly "backwards looking" and difficult to convert into meaningful action.
Our Experience
InterEd has been using available data and developing needed data for real-world analysis in resource-constricted higher education environments for most of our existence. Developing useful metrics has been a focal point of our deep client engagements for the last ten years.
We do not have any agreements or partnerships with specific technologies or companies. We accept no payments for recommending particular technological solutions. This independence allows us to help you find what is best for your specific situation.
We have deep understanding about what makes a metric actionable and how it helps you change for the better. The metrics we use are not magic, but we know that they drive the behaviors and processes to contribute to enrollment growth rather than just reporting on progress (or the lack of it).
Our Approach
Always pragmatic, InterEd will work with your leaders and the existing technological infrastructure to:
Identify and prioritize your actual analytical needs.
Define the goals of an analytics system.
Assess the capacity of your organization to develop a analytics system.
Determine how to proceed (there are several technologies and ways to get to a functional system.
Identify and contract with vendors as necessary.
Create “skunkworks” analytics, if appropriate, to quickly provide vital information.
