Data points from new software platforms are helping advisers work with students to keep them engaged and enrolled. But the information is also helping colleges revamp the courses those students take.
New technologies from several companies churn out statistics on a student’s grades, degree plan, and course schedule, but also on his or her financial situation, social background, and other matters discussed with an adviser. The data are collated on platforms shared by advisers and other administrators, faculty, and staff.
The job is becoming more professionalized, holistic, and high tech. But colleges are just beginning to learn how to use new masses of data to help their students thrive.
Beyond individual students’ success, at Middle Tennessee State University officials have used such data to help reshape several courses that serve as harbingers of a student’s future. By combing through the numbers, the university identified which students in certain courses were most and least likely to go on to graduate, and then, starting three years ago, discussed with faculty members and advisers how to better reach the low-performing group in these so-called predictive courses. The goal is to get more students the required general-ed credits and retain them through graduation.
In a History II class, for example, 80 percent of students who earned an A went on to graduate. For those with a C, the percentage dropped to 60. And more than half of those with lower grades never made it to commencement.
“It has become a discussion point for our faculty: How do we re-engineer these predictive courses so that most students can succeed in them?” says Rick Sluder, vice provost for student success at MTSU. “One faculty member used the information to motivate students by telling them that the course was important, that it could tell them whether they’ll make it or not.”
Faculty members were charged with remaking lower-level courses in English, psychology, history, and other subjects. A majority of the campus’s undergrads — 13,581 students out of 22,050 — enrolled in those 11 classes in the fall of 2017.
“Our most attended courses are the ones that can tell us the most about how we’re doing,” says Sluder. Without lowering standards, he says, faculty members have done everything from changing teaching materials to reordering how some lessons are taught.
Nationwide, colleges looking to retain more students should make similar changes, says John Gardner, chief executive of the Gardner Institute and an expert on student-success measures.
“There needs to be a redesign of the courses in the typical pathways students take so that the failure rate is lower,” he says. One in four students nationwide fails an intro American-history course. “It’s a huge problem for higher education,” Gardner says, and tying advising to those courses can go a long way toward making students more successful.
Though it’s too early to tease out the exact effect the reconfigured classes have had on encouraging students to continue, Sluder partially credits them for an increase of eight percentage points — from 68 percent in 2014 to 76 percent last year — in MTSU’s retention rate.
“We learn things about our institution,” he says, “that we never would have without the technology.”
