Are Students Socially Connected? Check Their Dining-Hall-Swipe Data

A pair of ideas in higher education have gained wide acceptance in recent years. One is the use of Big Data to help identify students who may be at risk of dropping out, and intervening to set them back on track. The other is the importance of social connections in student success.

Research scheduled to be presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Toronto on Tuesday combines those trends in a novel way to measure students’ social connectedness. Researchers at the University of Iowa collected data on a semester’s worth of ID-card swipes at the dining hall — nearly a half million from about 4,000 students in the fall of 2009 — and created a measure that correlates positively with retention and graduation rates.

The researchers calculated a meal-index, or m-index, which was the product of how many meals the students had — and with how many different people — as measured by how many times a student swiped his or her dining card within a minute of another student. To score a high m-index, a student has to have many meals with the same person, so a student who had 10 meals with 10 different students, for example, would have an m-index of 10, a high number indicating that the student was quite socially connected.

The researchers found a clear correlation with student success. While students with an average m-index had a 74-percent graduation rate in nine years, those whose m-index was a standard deviation higher than the average graduated at a rate of about 80 percent during the same period. The m-index was also predictive very quickly: Eight days of meal data, including the weekend before classes started, significantly predicted graduation, the authors wrote “even when accounting for student demographics, precollege academic achievement, prior college credits, and college experiences.”

Nicholas A. Bowman, a professor of education at Iowa and the first of five authors on the paper, hopes the data can be used to offer early interventions to students who may be struggling socially. The results could be analyzed by floor, building, or dining hall, Bowman says, to identify and make changes if a particular area has a problem with social isolation, or to have conversations with students about available resources.

“One of the nice things about Big Data is you can get everyone to be a participant in your understanding of what’s going on and look at it in interesting ways that would be very hard to ask about,” Bowman says. “Imagine trying to self-report asking students how broad is their social support. How do you even ask that question effectively?”

The Importance of Connection

Researchers have long known that social connections are crucial to student success, but colleges should be paying more attention to the role they play in retention and graduation rates, says Daniel Chambliss, a Hamilton College sociology professor and co-author of How College Works, a 2014 book about the student experience.

One often neglected leverage point, Chambliss says, is the design of dorms. Creating living spaces with long hallways and communal areas goes far in furthering social connections, he says. College dorms in recent years have offered students fewer places to meet one another, Chambliss says.

“Apartment-style dorms for freshmen are one of the worst innovations in higher education in the last quarter century,” Chambliss says. “It’s a money maker. High-school students think it would be cool to have their own apartment. And it’s cool. But you should wait until your sophomore or junior year after you’ve met other students.” Apartments “tend to isolate people.”

Chambliss says the difference between a student having no friends and one friend was large in the student’s overall college success. That might offer a potential limitation to the Iowa data, which measured the breadth of a student’s social network. A student with one or two very close friends but no broader network would have a low m-index, but may be fine socially.

Bowman recognizes that. “That would absolutely be the case,” he says. “The m-index is an interesting indicator. But in and of itself, it’s not the outcome we want to promote. It just happens to reflect this combination of a broad social network and engaging with them often. There are certainly other ways to be engaged.”

The study is yet another example of the rise of Big Data in higher education to improve retention and graduation rates.

“Elite private institutions have played this card for decades — small student-to-faculty ratios and lots of personalized attention,” says Timothy M. Renick, senior vice president for student success at Georgia State University, which in recent years has embraced an ambitious data-tracking and advising effort to improve student success. “The challenge for a lot of big public universities is we don’t have the resources to deliver that personalized attention. Big Data helps level the playing field.”

Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.