Student Success

The definition of student success is meant to change and evolve. For example, mental health wasn’t talked about and taken as seriously before the pandemic as it is today. Now, it’s considered a key component of student success. Without it, achieving things like high test scores and impressive internships isn’t possible.

Because you can’t improve what you can’t measure, one of the first steps to boosting graduation rates (the most tried and true metric of successful students) is for school communities to decide what student success means to them. Next comes determining the indicators you’ll track to not just report on student success but to continuously help students be more successful.

Below is a start based on our experience with colleges that have improved their student engagement and growth.

• Retention rate – It’s important to scan for multi-year trends or retention “red flags” among student cohorts.
• Academic performance – Automatic GPA calculators can be part of a student’s success dashboard, providing insights throughout the semester.
• Academic progress – With the average American student taking six years to graduate, improvement in this area is particularly critical as the nation tries to reduce college costs and student debt.
• Non-cognitive scores – Non-cognitive abilities don’t show up on exam scores, but they do include essential life skills like motivation, resiliency, motivation, and communication.
• Predictive risk scores – Institutions typically decide their own benchmarks for risk analysis, but the goal is to establish not only a system of alerts but a communication and intervention plan to course correct.

Putting it All Together

There are 3 pieces that hinder most institutions who want to adopt a data-informed, proactive student success program:

• Gathering data from across departments into one place
• Getting useful insights from that data
• Having those insights trigger communications and other activities that help students in real-time

Enter (again) the intelligent CRM.

Such platforms bring departments together to better serve students. With deep integrations to student information systems, data for student success metrics automatically flows in and is available in dashboards for human and AI advisors alike to monitor. They can be at the individual student level, a cohort, a class, or whatever fits a particular school’s goals.

And just like AI-powered administrative communications, student success messages are customized automatically based on the student’s needs and engagement style.

Better student success is more than a requirement for keeping schools healthy, it’s, as New York Times Magazine contributor Paul Tough notes, a way to “bring more confidence back to the equation people make when deciding to go to college or not.”