Data and data analytics are transforming business across industries as organizations realize how much value they can extract from their volumes of data to improve operations and the customer experience. By analyzing the data they collect about customers, operations, market trends, competitors, and more, organizations can take steps to identify where they’re losing money, how products are malfunctioning, where operations are causing downtime, and much more. That knowledge arms company leaders with insight that helps them resolve those issues and stay solvent in increasingly fluctuating markets.
One industry where big data and data analytics are really making a difference is in education, and most specifically, in higher education institutions. Competition is fiercer than it’s ever been among colleges and universities and the industry faces serious challenges that are becoming a threat to some campuses’ continued survival.
Serious challenges make it tough for colleges and universities to compete
One challenge many higher education institutions face is declining enrollment. The pandemic’s quarantine and community shutdown measures put a big dent in enrollment and attendance at colleges and universities, and numbers are just now getting back to pre-pandemic levels.
Another challenge is student retention and completion rates. One 2023 study found that “in most higher education institutions, about a third of all first-year students eventually opt to transfer.” Another report found that, of the students who started college in the fall of 2021, just over two-thirds came back for their second year. When students transfer or drop out altogether before gaining a degree, colleges and universities miss out on the tuition dollars those students would have provided, and lower budgets can mean reducing services.
At the same time that people are deciding not to go to college or dropping out after a year or two, higher education costs are rising. Institutions must do more with fewer resources, which in turn can make it hard to attract and retain students.
Besides these serious challenges, other roadblocks to success for higher education institutions include administrative budget cuts; increasing alternatives to traditional education, such as apprenticeships and trade schools; competition with increasing number of online educational sources; reduced support for research; aging, outdated facilities and equipment; and so on.
Data and analytics can be game changers for higher education
While there is no single magic bullet that can help colleges and universities around the world immediately resolve their serious challenges, data analytics can become a massive step toward renewed competitiveness and increased potential for success.
Data analytics can inform institutional leadership where the system is breaking down—which processes and operations are subpar, which student services aren’t as effective as they should be, which students are falling through the cracks and having trouble, how departmental spending is affecting student outcomes, what students are spending their time on, why researchers aren’t getting the grants they need to progress in their studies, and much more.
With the right data analytics platform, institutions can improve and enhance experiences for students, professors, support staff, administrators, and even students’ parents. Big data in education can help universities and colleges transform their business models, students’ academic outcomes, and professors’ effectiveness. Additionally, insights derived from big data can help educational institutions improve their technology systems.
Here are 10 ways insights from data analytics can do that:
1) Increase enrollment and/or make more accurate enrollment forecasts
Data analytics helps institutions stay aware of how well their marketing and recruitment strategies are working. For example, colleges and universities can track behavior of prospective students as they click through the institution’s website and see where students are spending more time on the site, what they do there, and where they’re abandoning the site. These insights can help institutions make their websites more engaging and offer the type of information and capabilities that attract prospective students.
With the right data, institutions can also make better predictions about future enrollment. Administration can look at demographic data, student interests, information from prospective student visits—even data about high school students and their preferences. Predictive analytics help institutions have a better idea of how many students will enroll in the near future, which helps administrators create budgets and allocate resources more effectively.
2) Improve student retention and completion rates
Colleges and universities are also using predictive analytics to look at dropout rates, why students are leaving, where they’re going, and what would help them decide to stay. With a wealth of such knowledge, administrators can create the programs and activate initiatives that will help retain students and help them achieve the goal of a degree.
Data analytics can also show institutions which students are at risk of dropping out and why, which enables them to take preemptive action and devise outreach strategies to help those students who might be struggling academically, socially, mentally, or in other ways. These strategies can include tutoring, counseling, or academic advising.
3) Make processes and operations more efficient for students and staff
Higher education institutions have a lot of bureaucratic processes that can be time-consuming and complex for students and staff alike. The admissions process, for example, can take months and entails a lot of paperwork. Applying for and collecting financial aid can be a cumbersome process as well. Registering for classes can be incredibly daunting for a new student.
With data analytics, institutions can get visibility into where those and other processes are experiencing bottlenecks. They can see where students or staff are making the most errors or giving up on the process altogether. Armed with that information, administrators can consider ways to streamline processes, make them more efficient, and help students and staff do what they need to without hassle.
4) Better assess academic performance
Administrators and professors can view data on student behavior and academic performance to get insight into how and where students are failing or having a hard time meeting academic requirements. This not only enables staff to intervene with at-risk students to help them through the term, but it also informs the institution which classes and subjects are giving students the most problems, which professors aren’t as effective and why, and a variety of other insights that can help the institution improve student outcomes by offering new services or overhauling programs that aren’t working.
5) Help faculty be more effective
Data on how effective professors are can also be valuable to institutions. This information enables administrators to revamp course offerings or hire new staff as needed to fulfill student preferences and needs. With data analytics, institutions can see how easy or difficult an instructor’s tests are or how certain curricula is working for students. Faculty themselves can use data to proactively make changes as needed in courses if students aren’t learning the way professors expect.
Insights from data analytics can help colleges and universities create learning options for students, such as online classes, e-books, and other software applications that can aid professors and improve outcomes. These insights can also inform administrators whether faculty members could benefit from further development or training.
6) Increase security and improve safety across campus
Physical safety on campus is an extremely high priority for most colleges and universities. Data analytics can be a critical tool in helping institutions identify potential security risks and vulnerabilities.
Devices such as video cameras gather enormous volumes of data, and analytics can parse that data and give insight into a wide range of safety factors, from how to improve traffic safety on streets that cross through campus to installing safety lighting and instant communication devices along deserted or remote locations. With real-time data analytics, safety incidents can be reported sooner and campus security response can be more effective and efficient.
Data analytics can also inform campus police where potential incidents might occur in large crowds, such as at a football game. Administrators can gain insight into likelihood of safety risks and use those insights to change dorm policies, for instance, or increase security staff at specific times and locations, or revise operating hours for certain buildings or activities.
7) Make technology more efficient
As higher education institutions turn to technology to help improve operations, enhance the student experience, and keep employees productive, data analytics can also help administrators ensure that those technology solutions keep running as they should. For instance, data analytics can give IT staff visibility into which applications are being used the most, which programs have glitches, which software is too complex or frustrating for students or staff, and which pieces of equipment are frequently malfunctioning. Analytics can identify potential security risks on the network, alert IT to suspicious behavior in the system, notify administrators of attacks or data breaches, and pinpoint errors within IT infrastructure.
8) Personalize learning and adapt to diverse educational needs
By analyzing student performance and academic progress, institutions can see which students might need new options for learning. Whether that’s having an assistant attend classes with the student to take notes or offering personalized tutoring in labs, adapting to students’ differing learning needs can help an institution not only retain existing students but also help them graduate. It can also become a selling point to attract new students.
Part of personalizing learning is also identifying trends about diverse needs through historical data or insight into student performance from previous terms. Some institutions use this data to offer students the ability to create their own learning tracks that are tailored to their unique learning style and needs.
9) Improve financial management and spending
As colleges and universities struggle with budget cuts and rising costs, they can use data analytics to help them see where they’re losing money and where they could be more efficient in spending or resource usage. For instance, data analytics can give details about how an institution is managing (or not managing) energy costs, which allows administrators to make changes to be more energy-efficient. With better insight, administrators can make better informed decisions about budget items such as energy costs, building maintenance, sports programs, extracurricular activities, on-campus housing, faculty salaries, and much more.
10) Manage resources better
Institutions create budgets to determine how they will spend their money, but they also need to determine how to allocate their non-monetary resources, such as instructors for student activities or clubs, room in the schedule for a new course, or physical space in buildings and other meeting areas. Data analytics can inform institutions which programs are most successful, which courses are popular, which clubs or classes are using prime building space and resources. Without that knowledge, administrators wouldn’t know if they were using the institution’s resources as efficiently and effectively as they could. With the right information, institutions can maximize their usage of resources, from filling dorms to capacity to purchasing additional equipment or gear for a particularly popular extracurricular activity.
Choose Phison for the data storage that supports big data and analytics
As higher education institutions increasingly rely on advanced big data and analytics to help them transform their offerings, they are also realizing they need an equally advanced solution for storing that data. Phison is a world leader in solid state drives (SSDs), SSD controllers and other storage solutions, and is a leading provider of low-latency, high-performance storage that meets the needs of big data and analytics.
Data analytics requires robust storage that can handle heavy-duty workloads. Phison’s enterprise-grade flash storage can handle both read- and write-intensive workloads, such as those in data analytics, AI and machine learning. Phison SSDs can also be customized to your specialized needs. The company’s flash memory and storage solutions provide significant design flexibility with its IMAGIN+ services that delivers advanced, industry-leading data storage solutions in small, lightweight form factors that consume very little power.
Big data and analytics can help colleges and universities transform their operations, improve student outcomes and ultimately boost revenue by attracting and retaining students. To support your analytics and ensure you get the insights your institution requires, choose Phison for NAND flash storage that offers the storage reliability and high performance you need
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