How to Remain Competitive in an Ever Changing Higher Education Landscape

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1 How to Remain Competitive in an Ever Changing Higher Education Landscape Hanne Breddam and Laura Prophet Managing Partners, BusinessMinds Good data and advanced analytics are the keys to responsive and informed decision making in times of change. Gartner Inc. recently released its Top 10 Strategic IT Trends for 2015, and a key forecast indicates that as data volumes and demand for analytics continue to grow, we will soon find ourselves in a world where business intelligence is more than just available to everyone, it s actually in everything.(gartner, 2015). Insightful decision making from your data. BusinessMinds create strategies, manage, design and implement: Customer Analytics Business Intelligence Data Warehousing Management and Control This is Part 5 of a series of 6 articles outlining the Top 5 Tips to Remaining Higher Education Market. Now let s have a look at Tip no. 4 for remaining competitive in tertiary education. Tip 4. Budget and plan for future student load. Be able to easily and reliably analyse past trends in attracting students, and conversion rates from application to enrolment. Globalisation and mobile technologies have given students more post-secondary education enrollment options that ever before. Universities have to work harder than ever to identify and attract their desired student profile, offer relevant courses and scheduling options and effectively plan and budget for future student loads to ensure ongoing profitability. And the challenges don t stop there. With increased, global competition the number of institutions chasing the same pool of prospective applicants is increasing. Changes to the education landscape through government policy changes further increases the need to be as competitive and forward facing as possible (while still maintaining BAU tasks). Students have more postsecondary education enrollment options than ever before Use Your Data and Advanced Analytics: Know and understand your students profiles how they consume information, learn, and which services are critical for them. Business intelligence, content management, and data technologies will equip your institution with the information they need to act quickly and stay relevant to your students and therefore accurately plan and budget for the future. Page 1 of 5

2 Predict Future Enrolments using Patterns in Historic Data By using the history of the schools and colleges where students have been sourced from in the past - including international locations organisations are able to make predictions on the future likely numbers of students and levels of qualifications that they will obtain from that institution. Data on numbers of students as they progress through the grades in particular numbers to graduate next year - are very valuable to make more accurate predictions as to the expected number of students that can be attracted to become new students. By having this quality data combined in the data warehouse with historical data many trends and insights can now be found. Predictive models are able to be built using this high quality data to make accurate predictions. Provide Relevant Courses Dig in your data to ensure you are providing courses that are relevant to your students. Develop a clear picture of which degrees, skills, and industries are of most interest to your prospective students. Are they looking for two-year or four year programs? What style of instruction or modality of learning are they most comfortable with? What is their desired time to completion? Institutions must be able to answer these key questions before setting programs in order that they match student preferences. There is no point offering well-designed, innovative courses for which there is no market. To do this analyse student feedback and social media content. Students will be talking about these things and with analytics you will be listening and acting. Analysis of your enrollment, conferral trends, types of instruction, graduation rates per degree, and postgraduation employment rates can also help in providing successful degree programs. Dig in your data to ensure you are providing courses that are relevant to your students Page 2 of 5

3 This insight can also assist in identifying opportunities for improvements to existing programs that will help attract desired applicants and achieve targeted outcomes. Use similar, publicly available data and social media analysis to compare competitors Degree Programs. Find Changing Attitudes and Interests using Social Media Social Media now provides a new opportunity to be able to monitor changing opinions and trends. The following shows an analysis of sentiment in different areas of the world on courses provided by one Australian educational institution. Interestinglylocal sentiment is poorer than international sentiments. Obviously different actions/messages need to be applied for each segment. All 1 2 Page 3 of 5

4 Social media also allows different institutions to be compared by many attributes over time. The following diagram shows a comparison of 2 institutions over time by year of graduation. 1 2 Develop Student Profiles Develop Profiles of Your Students. Clearly defining the backgrounds and personalities of your institution s current students demands and requirements can be very helpful in understanding and planning for future students. Page 4 of 5

5 Which segment of your student population has the highest retention rates? What are their socioeconomic backgrounds? Clearly identifying current students is very helpful in understanding and planning for future students. Age ranges? Income range? Media preferences? Secondary school location? These are just a few examples of the types of questions that will help develop a successful student demographic profile. For example: Collected data might indicate areas where high schools, industries, or economic conditions are creating the most likely applicants. Deeper analysis of student profiles will also reveal psychographic details about these students motivating factors, preferences, behaviors, and decision-making processes. For example, why were they attracted to a particular program? Do they share common learning styles or future goals? Insight into all of these elements and more will be crucial in developing and managing the provision of future services. Next in our Top 5 Tips we ll look at Tip 5. Set up processes to capture and use data to optimise marketing efforts that proactively attract the right students for your organisation. Also be able to monitor changing attitudes to your, and your competitors different offerings by different student groups and respond to these accordingly. Missed one of the Previous Newsletters? Contact Us! We ll happily send you one, or the full set of newsletters. here. Top 5 Tips Newsletter - Overview Tip 1 Plan for a Robust Data Repository. Tip 2 Create reliable reports and processes to measure profitability of each course and enable pricing to be set at the optimum levels. Tip 3 Plan for funding changes. Create processes to ensure a quality service is provided for students and that detect those in trouble so they can be assisted to completion. I.e. effectively manage the No completion, No funding issue. Page 5 of 5