A Data Driven Analytic Strategy for Increasing Yield and Retention

As many Universities face the constraints of declining enrollment demographics, pressure from state governments for increased student success, as well as declining revenues, the costs of utilizing anecdotal evidence and intuition based on ‘gut’ feelings to make time and resource allocation decisions become significant. However, grasping advanced statistical methods and analytics for data driven decision making can be overwhelming to some staff making buy in difficult. This paper describes how we are using SAS® Enterprise Miner to develop a model to score university students based on their probability of enrollment and retention early in the enrollment funnel so that staff and administrators can work to recruit students that not only have an average or better chance of enrolling but also succeeding once they enroll. Incorporating these results into SAS® EBI will allow us to deliver easy-to-understand results to university personnel.

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