Page 8 - College Planning & Management, January 2018

HIGHER EDUCATION TRENDS:
WHAT’S IN STORE FOR 2018
HERE’S WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT TO SEE THIS YEAR, PERHAPS EVEN ON YOUR OWN CAMPUS.
BY ELLEN KOLLIE
TOPIC: Business Intelligence
TREND: Toward Aggregated Data and Predictive Models
PREDICTED BY: Timothy M. Renick, Ph.D., vice president for Enrollment Management & Student Success, vice provost, and professor, Georgia State University, Atlanta
New forms of business intelligence, such as aggregated data and predic- tive models, will allow campus decision makers to be far more accurate
in anticipating student course needs and far more efficient in their use of campus instructional facilities, as we have been at Georgia State. For the past five years, we have tracked the academic progress of every student for 800 different risk factors on a daily basis. Based on predictive analytics, the system is responsible for more than 200,000 proactive interventions with students through the past five years. It has significantly increased the number of students graduating—increasing the total by more than 2,800 a year—and decreasing time to degree.
Now we are using similar analytics to make key business decisions about course needs and classroom facilities. Because we know where every student
is situated on their personal academ- ic map, we also know at any moment which courses they have com-
pleted successfully, which courses they need to take next, and which courses they are likely to need a year from now. Moving beyond the old standard of using historical data to predict future course and classroom needs, we now run aggregated data and predictive models for how many seats we will need in every course we offer, and we can do so for multiple terms in the future. Similar data sets are being used to create heat maps, which show classroom demand throughout the week, hour by hour.
8 COLLEGE PLANNING & MANAGEMENT / JANUARY 2018
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