NH Business Review, NH
05-24-07
N.H. firm brings intelligence to admissions process
As it is for most admissions directors, Mary Grondahl’s top priority is advancing
the College of St. Rose in Albany, N.Y., whose goal it is to continue it’s more
than 40 percent-per-decade growth rate. But, faced with a maximum capacity
situation, the college official needed a new perspective.
So the College of St. Rose turned to business intelligence technology to provide
that new outlook. It’s a choice that 30 other institutions of higher education
around the country have adopted over the last few months.
At schools such as Northwestern University, Iowa State University and the
University of Vermont, manual-intensive spreadsheets and difficult-to-use
statistical software solutions are being replaced by products from Rapid Insight of
Conway, N.H., which develops analytic software that enables higher education
institutions to thoroughly explore, visualize and understand their data.
By simplifying and automating the data-mining process, Rapid Insight Analytics
allows college admissions offices to understand and predict information on their
students and prospects.
According to Mike Laracy, president of Rapid Insight, better data intelligence
allow schools “to select the students that will be the most successful at their
institution, and that is what every educator wants — student success.”
“Data is power,” said Grondahl, vice president of enrollment at The College of St.
Rose. “The Rapid Insight solution allows us to make decisions on a dime rather
than having to wait for data from other departments, having to put together
several different reports, or needing to extract data from often cumbersome
systems. We are now able to immediately uncover potentials for expansion and
missed opportunities as well as to increase graduation rates and provide better
service to our students by knowing more about them.”
In Santa Barbara, Calif., Westmont College is using Rapid Insight Analytics to
develop a predictive model for recruitment and enrollment rather than casting a
wide net to make the best use of its capped 1,200-student enrollment.
The models take into account data such as students’ high school grade point
averages, SAT scores, ACT scores, student gender, major and state of
residence. The resulting information will be used to segment inquiries and
applicants into different groups so they can decide where college recruiters
should focus their efforts and how their marketing efforts and budget should be
spent.
Although Westmont only recently started using the solution, Joyce Luy, the
school’s dean of admissions, envisions being able to better choose and execute
on marketing tactics, such as mailings, advertising and events.
“Rather than doing a mailing to all of the prospective students, we can target our
mailings more selectively and put the resources that we would have spent
towards other, more fruitful, efforts.”