Community College Case Studies

• About: Cerro Coso is a midsize community college in Ridgecrest, CA, with ~5,000 students and a 45% retention rate.
• Challenge: Cerro Coso’s prospect management strategy was inefficient, with disconnected data and slow follow-ups. After a year with another CRM, implementation remained incomplete.
• Solution: Cerro Coso implemented Navigate360’s Recruitment Management (RM), streamlining recruitment and retention processes in one system, centralizing data for efficient tracking, and improving student service without staff overload
• Impact: Within 90 days of launching Navigate360 RM, Cerro Coso doubled the number of inquiries received and increased prospect communications sent by 447% without hiring additional staff.

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• About: Central Virginia Community College (CVCC) is a small institution in Lynchburg, VA. They have ~3,400 students and a 63% retention rate.
• Challenge: CVCC faced challenges scaling prospect management. Exploring other CRMs, they found none were built with community colleges in mind.
• Solution: CVCC launched Navigate360 RM in 90 days, piloted an automated inquiry form and streamlined post-inquiry workflows to enhance student service while improving staff efficiency.
• Impact: Within six months of deploying Navigate360 RM, CVCC saw a 30% increase in inquiry-to-enrolled yield and netted $522K in additional tuition revenue from 344 students enrolled via RM.

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• About: Arapahoe Community College, with three campuses and 9,600 students, is part of the Colorado Community College System. The three-year graduation rate is 20%.
• Challenge: Prior to partnering with EAB, Arapahoe struggled to gain traction with other early alert systems and faculty were wary of new student success technology. Departments and offices operated in silos, which led to uncoordinated and overwhelming communication to students. Advising appointments were also difficulty to manage and track, and advisors found it challenging to maintain their caseloads.
• Solution: Arapahoe introduced Navigate360’s early alert feature to streamline the process for faculty and ensure all student cases are properly triaged and addressed. Additionally, email and text message campaigns encourage students to schedule and attend advising appointments, lowering the no-show rate.
• Impact: The volume of early alerts increased 225% with Navigate360 compared to the previous system, which led to increased distribution of much-needed emergency funds. Following the outreach campaigns, the no-show/cancellation rate for advising appointments was just 7%.

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• About: Pueblo Community College (Pueblo) is a Hispanic-Serving Institution with over 5,000 students across three campuses. Approximately 70% of Pueblo’s students are part-time, and 34% are first-generation.
• Challenge: Two years into the pandemic, Pueblo faced serious enrollment challenges. Higher-than-expected summer melt in Fall 2021 led them to investigate causes that could threaten future semesters. Cross-campus communication issues, limited access to faculty during summer, and a lack of buy-in to student success initiatives were among the most pressing contributors.
• Solution: Pueblo leadership identified a two-pronged approach to address their enrollment problem. First, they created clearer advising processes powered by Navigate360. They also leveraged Navigate360’s student app to engage students throughout the advising process.
• Impact: Pueblo’s initiative empowered faculty and staff to clarify their roles in the advising process, limit time spent on wrong-fit tasks, and develop mutually agreed upon strategies for more effective student care. The faculty progress report response rate—a measure of active use and collaboration with staff advisors—increased by 11.2% and faculty advising appointments increased 191% in the 2021-22 academic year. The new process increased student engagement as well, yielding a 42% increase in Navigate360 app usage across the same timeframe.

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• About: Forsyth Technical Community College is a public community college in Winston-Salem, North Carolina serving over 10,000 students. About 50% of Forsyth Tech’s students attend part time and 34% of their students are Pell Grant recipients.
• Challenge: Forsyth Tech struggled with low retention, and their student success platform limited their ability to truly engage students and provide holistic support. The platform’s implementation process had been cumbersome, and they were unsuccessful in achieving strong utilization from students, faculty, or staff.
• Solution: Forsyth Tech established a workgroup of campus leaders from diverse areas to choose a new student success partner. They chose Navigate360 because of its 1) ease of use, 2) comprehensive communications tools, 3) student-facing mobile app, 4) integration with their existing systems, and 5) 360-degree support from their Navigate360 implementation team.
• Impact: With Navigate360, Forsyth Tech experienced positive outcomes in terms of both utilization and retention. In the first academic year after launch, they saw a 14% higher retention rate among students who attended advising appointments compared to those who did not. Forsyth Tech’s faculty progress report response rate increased 20%, and student app usage increased by 432% within one year.

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• About: Germanna Community College (GCC), part of the Virginia Community College System (VCCS), has 7,207 credit-earning students, a 68% retention rate, and a 37% graduation rate.
• Challenge: Prior to VCCS’s system-wide implementation of EAB’s Navigate360, GCC struggled with a muddled onboarding process that left students confused and inefficient advising that didn’t focus on long-term academic planning. In the words of GCC’s Assistant Dean of Student Development, “Students were more confused than they were educated.”
• Solution: GCC automatically provides all student applicants with access to Navigate360 as a checklist for onboarding. GCC also integrated Navigate360’s Program Advising tool into its freshman orientation course, allowing students and advisors to easily collaborate on academic plans across students’ first term and beyond.
• Impact: GCC’s applicant-to-enrollee rate increased by 14.5% in one year. Additionally, students with an academic plan in Navigate360 enroll in 3.4 more credit hours per semester on average and are 12.7 percentage points more likely to persist, equating to a combined $507,770 in additional and preserved tuition revenue each semester.

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• Background: Holyoke Community College (HCC) is a public institution in Holyoke, Massachusetts, serving 3,700 students, 33% of whom attend full-time. They are designated a Hispanic Serving Institution.
• Opportunity: In Spring 2023, HCC admissions and financial aid staff discovered that only 53% of New Student Orientation attendees had a completed financial aid package. Of the students with incomplete packages or no FAFSA on file, many didn’t know they were missing requirements or how to fulfill them. HCC lacked an alert system to notify students or financial aid staff of the missing items, causing many students to take financial aid issues to their advisors rather than a financial aid counselor, or to miss out on valuable aid packages altogether.
• Solution: Beginning in Summer 2023, HCC used EAB’s Navigate360 to
  create alerts for students who attended Orientation and submitted the FAFSA but were still missing required items. Students were then connected with a financial aid counselor via Navigate360’s Coordinated Care Network to help them complete their aid package requirements. The alerts also created case transparency so advisors and financial aid counselors could easily view ongoing student needs and track when cases were closed.
• Impact: By Fall 2023, HCC’s Missing Aid Requirements alert drove a 14% increase in completed financial aid packages among newly enrolled students, ensuring affordable access to education for more students. HCC’s financial aid team is a top user of Navigate360 alerts and reporting capabilities, leading to greater transparency and improved coordination between financial services and campus partners.Now, HCC’s Financial Aid office is expanding their use of Navigate360 capabilities. Using surveys, they’re reaching adult learners who may not be aware that they qualify for state-based financial resources. The alert effectively reached 99% of this group, enabling rapid follow up. HCC aims to broaden the alert’s reach to ensure no student falls through the cracks due to financial barriers.

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• About: Technical College of the Lowcountry (TCL) is a small two-year college in Beaufort, South Carolina with approx. 2,000 students, about 25% of whom attend full-time.
• Opportunity: TCL found that only 30% of admitted students completed onboarding and ultimately enrolled, with just 20% graduating within three years. TCL saw an opportunity to transform their student experience by adopting both the Guided Pathways framework and a comprehensive student success technology but lacked the resources to implement these initiatives independently.
• Solution: TCL secured a Title III Strengthening Institutions grant in 2019 to address student success challenges and selected EAB’s Navigate360 CRM to help them meet strategic goals and grant requirements. With Navigate360, they implemented Guided Pathways and tech-enabled onboarding and advising practices. To ensure a sustained investment, TCL’s Title III team, in collaboration with executive leadership, integrated these processes into their long-term student success strategy, enhancing the campus experience.
• Impact: TCL’s Title III and Navigate360 teams partner closely, ensuring sustained change in business processes and technology adoption through ongoing strategy conversations with their EAB Strategic Leader. TCL prioritized identification of early campus adopters during the implementation process, particularly among faculty, improving buy-in and utilization.

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• About: Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC) is a public two-year vocational-technical college serving 25,000+ students. Their Fall 2021 fall-to-spring persistence rate for first-time degree-seeking students is 65%, and 55% of all enrollees during AY21 self-identified as students of color.
• Challenge: In Fall 2021, MATC found that registration holds and small account balances were creating persistence barriers for thousands of students. These barriers disproportionately impacted first-generation, low-income, and underrepresented minority students. MATC partnered with EAB’s Moon Shot for Equity initiative to eliminate equity gaps in retention and ultimately graduate more students.
• Solution: In Fall 2021, MATC activated a cross-departmental Retention Grants Team to develop and deploy a program that would incentivize students close to graduation to register for the following term. A Hold Reform team also worked to improve persistence outcomes by eliminating the deregistration process, removing a registration hold based on low account balance, and providing one free transcript despite an unpaid account balance.
• Impact: 1,586 students were awarded micro-grants. The recipients persisted at a 10% higher rate than the general student population from Fall 2021 to Spring 2022. Further, an additional 467 students were able to register when MATC eliminated the registration hold.

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• Background: College of Lake County (CLC) is a public community college in Lake County, Illinois, with 20,500 students, 27% of whom attend full-time.
• Opportunity: CLC reviewed data from over 9,000 students who withdrew to understand what caused students to lose momentum. While CLC offered a number of basic needs support services, they found that less than 15% of students knew what resources were available, and 55% reported feeling CLC did only “some” or “very little” to help meet non-academic needs.
• Solution: Through a combination of design-thinking, technology, internal infrastructure, and external partnerships, CLC created a framework for holistically serving student needs beyond the classroom. They surveyed students to identify gaps, then established a Community Resource Advisor (CRA) position dedicated to supporting student basic needs. They also set up new information-sharing workflows through Navigate360 to ensure students, faculty, and advisors knew of available resources and how to access them.
• Impact: CLC’s use of Navigate360 early alerts, comprehensive campaigns, and coordinated care network coupled with the creation of the CRA role led to 30.7 percentage-point higher persistence in one semester among students who were referred to the CRA and completed an intervention.

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• Background: The Community College of Denver (CCD), a Hispanic-serving institution, has a total enrollment of 7,273 students, 78% of whom attend part-time and 63% of whom are firstgeneration college students.
• Opportunity: CCD’s efforts to address equity gaps had grassroots support among faculty and staff. However, in the absence of clear, actionable steps and a structured framework, progress stalled, hindering the translation of support into an effective, coordinated plan to address equity gaps on campus.
• Solution: CCD joined EAB’s Moon Shot for Equity initiative in the summer of 2022. By implementing Moon Shot’s research informed and field-tested best practices, campus leaders made tangible changes to transfer pathways, curriculum, career development, and onboarding. The leadership’s active involvement in these structured opportunities to enhance the student experience led to a broader transformation. This transformation unveiled opportunities for improving organizational culture, applying equity-minded inquiry to data, establishing new norms for cross-campus collaboration, and harnessing new insights through the Moon Shot community of practice.
• Impact: By integrating Moon Shot into their Guided Pathways implementation efforts, enhancing collaboration between co-located institutions, facilitating leadership development through EAB-led sessions on data literacy and equity minded inquiry, and creating structured opportunities to redesign policies and practices, CCD has harnessed the passion of campus stakeholders and translated it into tangible action and improved student outcomes.

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• About: El Camino College (ECC) is a large public community college in Torrance, CA with 20,400 students.
• Challenge: ECC wanted to create an integrated data source for Learning Management System (Canvas) and Student Information System (Colleague) data. Neither platform offered access to data in a digestible format. Conflicting and confusing coding systems in the LMS and SIS made it challenging for leaders to use data for strategic enrollment management and diversity, equity, inclusion, and access (DEIA) initiatives.
• Solution: ECC used Edify’s automated higher education data model to combine and standardize data from Canvas and Colleague in only two months. Edify matches fields automatically, even if they are coded differently within and between systems and platforms. EAB’s data experts used ECC’s standardized data to produce dashboards that allow decision-makers to view and act quickly on trustworthy SIS and LMS data to examine enrollment and registration metrics.
• Impact: ECC now has access to a unified student record based on clean, reliable data. With standardized, governed data from Colleague and Canvas available in a single location, decision-makers can consult rich dashboards to investigate registration trends, credits, and LMS usage metrics.

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• About: Northampton Community College is a public two-year college serving 20,000+ students across three campuses in Pennsylvania. 65% of their students are first-generation and 96% of recent graduates are employed or continuing their education.
• Challenge: Northampton struggled to meet annual compliance reporting requirements due to an ineffective data management process. It took weeks to complete each reporting cycle, and they often missed deadlines and requirements.
• Solution: In Summer 2022, Northampton partnered with Edify, EAB’s education data and analytics solution, to automate their compliance reporting process by creating saved, repeatable workflows that mirrored both IPEDS and state report structures. Northampton’s IE staff were then able to easily run their reports, check for errors, and submit them on time.
• Impact: With ongoing support from EAB’s professional services team, they saved hundreds of hours and expect to save even more in future cycles. With automated, repeatable workflows in place, they will be able to pull future reports, validate the data and submit both state and federal reports in less than a day. Automating a necessary process like compliance reporting has freed them up to focus on projects supporting their primary data goal: to create a culture of data confidence across the institution.

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• About: North Iowa Area Community College (NIACC) is a public community college in Mason City, Iowa with 2,500 students, about half of whom attend full-time.
• Opportunity: Greg Bailey, NIACC’s CIO, knew that to improve access to enrollment data, his institution needed to modernize its approach to data infrastructure in a cost-effective, customized fashion. NIACC sought a cloud-based data management platform that would enable deep data exploration. Bailey wanted to be hands-on with the implementation process and apply his institutional knowledge and technical expertise to ensure the platform was tailored to NIACC’s needs.
• Solution: NIACC implemented EAB’s Edify to centralize and synthesize Canvas, Colleague, Navigate, and National Student Clearinghouse data. During implementation, Bailey was in direct communication with EAB’s engineers, vetting design and offering input on code.
• Impact: The SEM dashboard allows NIACC to understand and strategize around trustworthy data. Bailey participates in weekly conversations with his designated Strategic Leader at EAB, uncovering potential future projects and exploring additional areas of interest for improving NIACC’s data infrastructure.

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• About: The Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) is a multi-campus public community college in Pittsburgh, PA with 20,336 credit-earning students.
• Challenge: CCAC wanted to deliver a proactive, holistic, and tailored support approach across their Student Success Services team. CCAC encountered several limitations with their Ellucian Advise student success platform, including its lack of appointment scheduling functionality. CCAC sought an improved system but hoped to preserve all Advise data for reference. Additionally, CCAC wanted to investigate which factors made students most likely to stop out.
• Solution: CCAC implemented Navigate360 and Edify (EAB’s CRM and Data & Analytics Solution, respectively). Edify allowed CCAC to conduct a historical review of Advise data, including alerts, flags, student GPA, and Pell eligibility. CCAC also incorporated student records (broken down into subsets ) from an institution-developed platform, facilitating a comprehensive review. Navigate360 equipped CCAC to communicate with students, receive alerts regarding early academic needs of students, and track appointments.
• Next Steps: With data stored securely in Edify, CCAC plans to build a predictive model to improve their enrollment strategies. CCAC will also use Edify and Navigate360 to identify student issues or concerns, track which resources students are referred to, and measure which intervention and outreach strategies and resources have the greatest impact on student success and retention.

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• About: The Community College System of New Hampshire (CCSNH) is a network of seven community colleges serving 26,000 students.
• Challenge: CCSNH sought to foster efficiency in several departments, including the Registrar, Advising, and Admissions offices, by improving access to pivotal decision-informing data. Data reports were manual and static, costing valuable Institutional Research (IR) staff time to generate and distribute. With a small IR team across the System, hundreds of employees to serve, and varying levels of user expertise, CCSNH needed an intuitive tool that would grant employees direct access to actionable data.
• Solution: CCSNH implemented Rapid Insight’s cloud-based dashboards in 2019, granting easy data access to employees across the system. Personalized dashboards allow users to prioritize work and make informed decisions. As a result, Institutional Researchers at the colleges can reclaim time for important strategic priorities.
• Impact: CCSNH can make informed decisions at all levels of the organization, from strategic planning to individual student assistance. Live, up-to-date dashboards provide academic counselors with lists of students who need assistance, enabling responsive and impactful support. Administrators use Rapid Insight, part of Edify, to identify programs with strong term-to-term persistence, sharing out best practices to improve retention in other programs. The resulting improvements in graduation rates and equity contributed to the selection of White Mountains Community College (a CCSNH campus) as a semi-finalist for a 2023 Aspen Award for Community College Excellence.

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