Data and Analytics Case Studies

• About: Oregon Institute of Technology (Oregon Tech) is a small public university in Klamath Falls, OR. Oregon Tech enrolls 5,325 students at multiple campuses throughout the Pacific Northwest.
• Challenge: Oregon Tech’s administrative technology portfolio cost significant money and IT staff time to maintain and contributed to poor data accessibility. The institution is leanly staffed as a means of managing costs, so technology maintenance represented a significant burden. Frustrated with their reliance on a few monolithic platforms, Oregon Tech sought a solution that allowed for a more modular ecosystem with greater data accessibility and the ability to optimize data quality while minimizing maintenance needs.
• Solution: The school partnered with Edify, EAB’s Education Data Platform in spring 2020. Putting Edify at the center of their digital enterprise has allowed Oregon Tech to choose the best-fit, best-cost solutions for campus without being beholden to a single vendor.
• Impact: By shifting away from a single-vendor model, Oregon Tech can recapture and reallocate millions of dollars in IT spend toward high-priority student success initiatives across multiple years of partnership.

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• About: Northampton Community College is a public two-year college serving 20,000+ students across three campuses in Pennsylvania. Sixty-five percent of their students are first-generation, and ninety-six percent 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: Utah Tech University (UTU) is a midsize public open-enrollment university in St. George, Utah, with over 11,000 students, threequarters of whom are from Utah. At UTU, 84% of students receive scholarships, grants, or other financial aid, and 85% of graduates are employed upon graduation.
• Challenge: Before their partnership with EAB, institutional research at UTU was largely compliance-driven. Data management and governance were siloed, leading to inconsistent data accuracy and widespread frustration. UTU set out to become more data-informed, appointing a new cabinet-level Executive Director of Institutional Effectiveness position to build a high-performance analytics organization.
• Solution: UTU partnered with EAB to implement Edify, an education data platform that organizes data and facilitates access to reliable information. In addition to implementing the Edify platform on campus, the IE team also implemented data governance best practices with EAB’s guidance, building the culture and technical infrastructure to support data-informed decisions.
• Impact: UTU’s data now flows through Edify, and analysts leverage the Edify data model to build new analyses. By connecting Edify to Tableau and RStudio, the IE team is growing UTU’s analytical capacity, shifting from an environment of snapshots and manually updated data to interactive visualizations and analyses that can automatically update as data is refreshed.

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• About: Utah Tech University (UT) is an open access public university in St. George, Utah with 12,556 students and a 36% six-year grad rate.
• Opportunity: UT ran various student success initiatives to improve the first-year experience, including enrollment campaigns in Navigate360, EAB’s higher education CRM. UT sought a custom solution to measure the impact of these efforts, consolidate data, and improve processes.
• Solution: Edify, EAB’s higher ed data and analytics solution, provides a central hub for disparate data from across campus. UT used Edify’s data model to consolidate data and improve data access and governance. Their Institutional Effectiveness (IE) and Student Success Teams meet weekly, creating an effective feedback loop as they use Edify to evaluate the impacts of student success efforts, analyze changes in outcomes, and adjust future initiatives.
• Impact: Through UT’s work with both platforms, they have achieved a fuller picture of the impact of student success initiatives and identified improvement opportunities in several key areas, including enrollment campaigns, first-year engagement, student communications, and holds.

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• About: St. Ambrose University (SAU) is a small private university in Davenport, IA, with a total enrollment of 2,916.
• Challenge: Department chairs and deans lacked accessible data to inform and measure the impact of resource allocation decisions. Existing reports included disparate data points and required extensive manual analysis.
• Solution: SAU used Edify to standardize all required data, then produced reports with custom data and filters for each department chair. Edify enabled SAU to use key department-level metrics to inform resource requests and make allocation decisions. Streamlined, customized reports provided the exact data department chairs needed to see, increasing decision-making efficiency.
• Impact: SAU’s partnership with Edify has improved transparency in the resource allocation process. With easily accessible data, the labor-intensive and time-consuming process of analyzing different data points has been drastically reduced. Additionally, SAU has identified opportunities to shift resources to high-demand departments.

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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.
• Future Impact: ECC plans to integrate data from their CRM and their Starfish Student Success Platform, creating a more holistic and accessible data model.

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• About: University of Montana (UM) is the flagship institution of the Montana University System. Located in Missoula, MT, UM is a large public research university that enrolls 11,000 students.
• Challenge: The University of Montana has suffered from enrollment declines over the past decade. Poor governance hampered attempts to remedy the decline. Data was stored in separate systems that only experts could access, reports were hard to compile, and different teams often produced different answers to the same question. Data-informed recommendations were sometimes ignored because leaders received conflicting figures.
• Solution: UM partnered with EAB’s education data platform, Edify, to improve data governance and increase access. Edify aggregates and organizes all campus data into one environment with a single point of access. With newly centralized data, UM’s team of developers can easily export data to over 50 dashboards they’ve built in Tableau, making validated data available for analysis and decision support across campus.
• Impact: UM’s Institutional Research (IR) team regained hours previously spent manually updating dashboards. The IR team is using this new time for higher-order analyses, for example, developing KPIs for the five initiatives in the UM strategic plan and analyzing historical student accounts data to create an interactive dashboard that will help maximize the impact of tuition waivers on enrollment.

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• About: John Carroll University (JCU) is a small private Jesuit liberal arts university outside Cleveland, Ohio, with more than 3,600 students, consistently ranked one of the Midwest’s top regional universities.
• Challenge: JCU’s technology ecosystem ballooned in recent years, leading to siloed data accessible only through a complex web of integrations. Running multiple technology systems, each with its own data management path, meant basic figures weren’t consistent across systems. Changes to a system, integration, or analysis required significant time and effort from JCU’s IT team.
• Solution: JCU partnered with EAB to implement EAB’s education data platform, Edify, as a comprehensive integration command center. Data communicating between systems now flows through Edify, which automates data validations and serves as the single control point for all cross-system integrations.
• Impact: JCU’s IT team can easily change data definitions across systems, since data is aggregated in one comprehensive model. With the time saved by Edify, they also have time to support strategic initiatives as the institution develops more sophisticated uses for data and analytics. Beyond IT, users across campus can easily access data without source system expertise and be confident in the data’s quality.

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• About: Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) is a large public research university with a total enrollment of 21,913.
• Challenge: MTSU lacked a standardized process for evaluating faculty line requests. Deans and department chairs did not have clear submission guidelines or evaluation criteria, and the provost faced a barrage of sporadic requests containing different data points, making objective evaluation difficult. Additionally, deans and chairs felt that, without a standardized process, subjectivity could play a role in evaluation.
• Solution: The provost and key stakeholders developed objectives, deadlines, and a formal process for faculty line requests. EAB partnered with MTSU to surface and consolidate the necessary data. MTSU initially created an Excel sheet to provide chairs and deans with required data, and while the Excel sheet facilitated the process, it was not immediately comprehensible to everyone who needed to use it. Using EAB’s Edify, MTSU automatically standardized required data and made it easily accessible with intuitive and filterable dashboards.
• Impact: Deans and chairs can find and understand required data and complete faculty line requests efficiently using the new faculty line request process and Edify dashboards. The provost can review and assess requests using standardized, objective criteria, creating a transparent and trusted process for all involved.

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• Background: 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 multicampus 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: Elmira College is a private college with a total enrollment of 673 students, a 76% retention rate, and a 56% six-year graduation rate.
• Challenge: Elmira had difficultly accessing data from their Enterprise Resource System (ERP), making detailed enrollment analysis and strategy challenging. Exacerbating the problem, Elmira saw several key IT staff resign in 2021. Facing a staff shortage and inadequate data access, Elmira needed a sustainable, user-friendly enrollment reporting system to facilitate strategic conversations before their enrollment census date.
• Solution: Elmira implemented EAB’s Edify, unifying their ERP, SIS, and admissions CRM into one standardized source of truth. Their first output was a Strategic Enrollment Dashboard, which gives Elmira a trustworthy, clear picture of its enrollment forecast. The dashboards allow end users to segment their student population by specific criteria, such as major, enrollment cohort, and special populations. The data refreshes daily, equipping administrators to craft enrollment strategies based on reliable data. During IT staff turnover, the dashboards continue to refresh automatically and provide useful data to board members.
• Impact: Before Edify, Elmira’s annual census report meeting required administrators to huddle over spreadsheets debating the report’s accuracy. With Edify, senior leadership at Elmira can focus on strategically planning for the upcoming term rather than validating their data. Edify’s automated data warehouse also equipped Elmira College to use predictive analytics to identify enrollment and retention opportunities going forward.

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• About: Fairfield University is a midsize private Jesuit college in Fairfield, CT, with 5,500 students, a 90% average retention rate, and an 84% six-year graduation rate.
• Challenge: Like most colleges, Fairfield was forced to make rapid, significant changes to every facet of its operations when COVID-19 struck. Seeking to provide a safe on-campus education experience for students in the Fall 2020 semester, administrators created a task force of staff and health professionals. The task force required accessible, up-to-date data that could help them respond to the evolving situation.
• Solution: Fairfield’s Institutional Research department used Rapid Insight’s self-service analytics technology to organize reams of live data from several sources (both internal and external), then output the data to Excel for distribution to the COVID-19 task force and for public consumption. Using the dashboard, the task force could make data-driven decisions to contain infections, predict positivity rates, estimate the number of tests required, and prepare isolation beds.
• Impact: Fairfield’s Rapid Insight dashboard allowed the task force to make timely, informed decisions and provide students with a safe on-campus experience. As the challenges presented by the pandemic continue to evolve, Fairfield’s response is adapting as well, shifting from contact tracing to testing availability to vaccination rates. With Rapid Insight’s intuitive, repeatable data workflows, Fairfield’s IR team easily expands the dashboard to answer new questions.

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• About: Lipscomb University is a small private Christian university in Nashville, TN, with 4,884 students, an 86% retention rate, and a 69% six year graduation rate.
• Challenge: Facing a dip in retention, Lipscomb sought to create an efficient, impactful data strategy to course-correct. Lipscomb wanted to identify students struggling with coursework, contact those students, and invite them to the Academic Support Center. However, compliance reporting took two months for their one-person Institutional Research team to complete, limiting time to focus on this initiative. Disorganized data and a lack of up-to-date outreach lists posed additional obstacles.
• Solution: Lipscomb implemented Rapid Insight’s data analytics tools (Construct, Predict, and Bridge) to organize student data, flag students at risk of attrition, and structure Academic Support outreach lists using live data. Lipscomb also used Construct to automate the time-consuming accreditation reporting process.
• Impact: A 15 percentage-point retention rate improvement over nine years generated $18 million in tuition and fee revenue. Additionally, Lipscomb now completes its accreditation reporting in two days rather than two months—a 95% reduction in required staff time.

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• About: Loras College is a private Catholic college with 1,300 undergraduate students.
• Challenge: Faced with a dip in retention, Loras College’s CFO and VP of Enrollment Management needed a fast, centralized enrollment and revenue report. However, the report required data from several platforms and offices, and obtaining that data required a cumbersome sequence of SQL queries, conversations, and manual updates. Additionally, the report was available only in a one-size-fits-all format, restricting its utility for each individual decision-maker. Compounding the problem, the department was short two of its usual five FTEs.
• Solution: Loras built workflows in Rapid Insight that automatically gather data from the student information system and other campus sources. The workflows include a predictive model that forecasts enrollment and revenue for coming terms. The data exports to an intuitive, customizable dashboard, equipping the CFO, VPEM, and other stakeholders to view the data in whichever format best enables them to make decisions.
• Impact: The weekly enrollment report, which formerly required 4 hours of convoluted SQL queries, now takes only fifteen minutes to create. Based on the success Loras had using Rapid Insight for its weekly enrollment reports, Loras expanded its use of Rapid Insight to IPEDS (which now takes less than three hours per submission cycle) and more than fifty other reports.

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• About: Mount Saint Mary’s University (MSMU) is a private college in Los Angeles, CA, with 3,000 students, a 72% retention rate, and a 63% six year graduation rate.
• Challenge: Like every American university that receives federal financial aid funding, MSMU is required to submit a large amount of data to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)’s Integrated Post-Secondary Education Data System (IPEDS). MSMU’s existing process for gathering, organizing, and submitting data consumed 40 tedious hours of staff time across multiple research analysts. It required manual data input and a time consuming verification process to ensure accuracy prior to submission.
• Solution: MSMU used Rapid Insight to develop workflows for the IPEDS Completions Survey, one of three major reporting periods each year. The workflows gather data from all relevant sources and compile a clean, accurate file for automated upload to the NCES. The saved, repeatable workflows can be reused each IPEDS cycle with minimal updates to match new IPEDS submission guidelines.
• Impact: Rapid Insight reduced the time required to finish the Completions Survey by 75%, from 40 hours to 10. This freed up two staff members to work on other institutional priorities. MSMU currently uses Rapid Insight for the IPEDS Completions Survey and plans to develop workflows for the remaining IPEDS surveys.

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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 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 semifinalist for a 2023 Aspen Award for Community College Excellence.

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