I recently had the opportunity to attend the HEDW Conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The conference was a real testament to how Colleges and Universities are viewing and using data to make more informed decisions. Whether it be for enrollment, retention, student success or advancement, they understand how to best harness the power of data for institutional improvement.
As part of its annual Tom Tom Fest, Charlottesville hosted its Applied Machine Learning Conference earlier this month. Our HelioCampus data scientists and engineers joined other local data science practitioners for a day of robust discussion, practical guides to new techniques, and machine learning concepts applied in innovative ways to solve real-world problems.
Our latest eBook explores the topic of Institutional Planning for higher education. A lot is riding on universities’ performance metrics: enrollment and recruitment numbers, student outcomes and livelihoods, and funding. In fact, more than 30 state governments in the U.S. have policies or formulas that allocate funds to public institutions based on student performance factors 1. Universities with the ability to improve performance with comprehensive and data-driven institutional planning stand to fare better than their peers.
Last week, representatives from more than 40 institutions across North Carolina convened at Wrightsville Beach for the annual NCAIR conference. Located in a beach town near waters once frequented by the infamous privateer Blackbeard, this year’s event was piratically titled “Finding Your Treasure." Directors, researchers, and analysts discussed how they discover hidden gems and insights among the sometimes-overwhelming amounts of institutional data.
Recently we partnered with Inside Higher Ed and Harford Community College's President, Dr. Dianna Phillips, for a webinar on Implementing Transformational Analytics Strategies. The webinar featured an engaging discussion that started with sharing the challenges facing Harford Community College (HCC) (and other community colleges), and why HCC chose to invest in strategic planning tools and technologies to solve them.
This week, presidents and key executives from NAICU member colleges gathered in Washington, DC, to tackle the tough challenges facing university leadership in tumultuous times. The agenda covered legislative issues impacting higher education, how to succeed in today’s evolving higher education environment and more.
The rise of data analytics. Government efforts to introduce accountability stats for colleges and universities. Students’ increased voice in institutions of higher education. These are a few of the forces revolutionizing the field of institutional research. This shift is already underway, but what is leading it? Experts point to these five developing trends as informing and shaping the transformation.
In higher education, it’s widely understood that student success and institutional success go hand-in-hand. As a result, colleges and universities spend countless dollars trying to support students on the journey toward achieving their degrees.But are these attempts working? What does student success really look like? And what barriers might be preventing students from succeeding in a specific institution? To ensure they’re making the best spending decisions and allocating limited resources in the most effective ways possible, colleges and universities require a means to measure student success and institutional opportunities – and that’s where analytics come in.
Today, over 100 MSCHE attendees came to the Frostburg State University (FSU) presentation on using a data platform to inform institutional assessment. FSU partners with HelioCampus to provide the data infrastructure and data science services to ensure that decision making and resource allocation are well informed by data. Sara-Beth Bittinger, Ed. D., Director of Assessment and Institutional Research and Denise Murphy, Assistant Vice President for Finance and Budget, from FSU walked the audience through how data is transformed in the data warehouse and translated into visualizations to inform decision making. Specific examples include analysis and visualization of the elements of the admissions funnel to inform recruitment strategies, efforts to better understand past institutional aid packaging practices to inform current financial aid strategies, and the development of a robust toolkit designed for academic department chairs to help them effectively manage their departments.
Institutions of higher learning continue to move rapidly toward data-informed decision making, and this movement was strongly reflected at the 45th annual North East Association for Institutional Research conference. The City of Bridges played host to almost 400 representatives from over 200 institutions and associations to better understand methods and best practices for Creating the Bridge to Data-Informed Decision Making.
