David L. Felsenthal will admit it: He’s a “research dork.” He’s also chief executive officer of EAB, one of the biggest engines in the enrollment-services field.
Formerly known as the Education Advisory Board, the Washington-based company consults with about 1,000 colleges. EAB claims to support a quarter of all U.S. college students with its predictive-analytics system, which helps institutions identify which of their students are at risk of failing and connect them with campus resources. The company also mines its vast trove of student data to help colleges recruit and enroll hordes of tuition-payers each year.
As you might have heard, that’s a big business — and a valuable one. Late last year, the Advisory Board Company sold EAB to an investment firm for $1.55 billion, roughly the value of the Texas Rangers. The sale included Royall & Company, a Virginia-based business specializing in student recruitment, which EAB had purchased a few years earlier for $850 million. Now EAB will be an independent entity, with Royall operating under its name.
Mr. Felsenthal, 47, pulls down a seven-figure salary that may make an associate professor gasp. But who is he? And what does he think about today’s intense enrollment challenges? The Chronicle caught up with him to find out.
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As an undergraduate, you wrote a history thesis on the Alaskan salmon-fishing industry in the mid-20th century. Please explain.
I spent a summer in Alaska and loved being out there, fishing and camping. I was looking for a way to get back. I had no money, so I applied for a grant to do research for my thesis. Out there I stumbled upon research on the fight between the people who had sought to get statehood for Alaska and the fishing industry, which liked it being a territory, so they could control the rules and regulations around salmon fishing. The big problem then was that the streams were being overfished.
OK, I have to ask: What can colleges, fishing for prospective students, learn from folks who fish for salmon?
The challenges enrollment leaders are having in terms of filling the class, making sure they’re bringing in a diverse student body, are huge. As hard as salmon fishing is, I don’t think there’s anything harder than being the head of enrollment right now.
And how does EAB help those poor souls?
Part of this is making sure that students are accountable — and have the right information to help themselves.
At heart, it is a best-practice research firm. We find the biggest challenges facing our members and look for innovative ways in which people are solving those problems. We then try and help our members hard-wire those strategies into their organizations, to make sure they’re getting the best return on their dollar that they can, and that their students are getting the best return on their education that they can.
Tell us about an insight that changed the way you think about student success.
A lot of our work around student success came because the other part of the Advisory Board was in health care. So we took a lot of concepts around population health — making sure consumers, and not just patients, stay as healthy as possible throughout their life cycle — and brought that same kind of theory over to education, to think about the student life cycle, everything from kindergarten through college and employment outcomes.
What lessons from health care might apply to higher ed?
On the health care side, we realized that the data are not necessarily going to tell you the answer, but they are going to point you in the right direction. One lesson would be this concept of the “murky middle.” Everybody (for the most part) knows which students are definitely going to be fine in terms of graduating. Everybody knows which students are most likely going to have the most trouble, and you definitely need to pay attention to them.
But the key to where you win or lose is in that murky middle. How do you find that student who’s maybe going off-track, or is in the wrong major in terms of ability to graduate, or to graduate on time? How do you intervene in that moment?
The trick is that for two students in the murky middle, one might need a different intervention than the other, right?
Yes. If you take a look at most colleges, given the financial pressures, the ratio of students to advisers is only going up. What we’ve tried to do is make sure we’re using predictive analytics to say: Out of 100 students, these are the 20 that you need to prioritize.
Inside that, we provide information about why we worry about each student. Maybe it’s that they’re not going to class. Or maybe they had trouble in a course that’s an indicator for success, or lack thereof, within a certain major. We feed that information to advisers to make sure they’re talking to students about the right thing.
That’s only part of the equation. Among those 20 students, data often can lie. You’ve got to actually get to know that student and understand what’s really going on. You’ve got to look at the data and then say “OK, as a result, what’s the right answer?” When you see a student who seems at risk, you have to make sure you’re looking at that student as an individual.
Is it possible for a college to collect too much information?
You’ve always got to be very focused on privacy and the appropriate use of data. And I do think there’s such a thing as too much data. You can often end up navel-gazing, saying, “Gosh, if only I had one more data source, I’d know so much more about students.”
We can take in any data source a member wants us to take in and figure out how likely that is to impact the student, but we generally find that we get to a point of diminishing returns, where that next data source is not really giving you that much more information.
Besides student success, as measured by all the traditional outcomes, is EAB also looking at student happiness or contentment?
On the research side, we are spending a ton of time on this. It’s a huge issue. In our Student Success Collaborative, we’re starting to do more in terms of empowering students. That means giving them access to information on how to succeed, and making sure that we’re understanding what else they’re doing outside the classroom that’s making them happy.
To bring it back to health care, you can’t really make someone healthy unless they’re going to take responsibility for their own health as well. So part of this is making sure that students are accountable — and have the right information to help themselves.
As important as that is, someone still might wonder how in the world your company is worth so much money. How would you explain it?
All they have to do is read the newspaper to see how challenging it is for schools and universities right now. They’re facing huge challenges. We’ve been very lucky in being able to find unique solutions to problems — to help students succeed, and, more and more, to help institutions succeed financially. Colleges have a moral imperative to make sure they’re graduating their students, but at the same time, if you’re able to keep more students and graduate them, you’re keeping that tuition as well. The key has been making sure we are providing tangible results.
Your company used to be called Education Advisory Board. Now it’s just EAB, kind of like IBM, SAT, or KFC. Is that weird?
The thing I’m most excited about — as a Southerner who loves fried food — is that you compared us to KFC. We wanted to simplify the message about the company and what we do. “Education Advisory Board” was a bit of a mouthful.
What other challenges are you looking at right now?
One is financial aid. Everybody thinks about financial aid as hugely important in terms of enrolling students, which it is. The other place where we know (through predictive analytics) it can have a big impact is retention. That can be making sure that a student has the right financial-aid package upfront, but it also can be microscholarships that colleges provide during the school year. Small additional grants throughout the year can really help retention. There are only so many dollars to provide in financial aid, so if you can’t figure out where to spend those dollars to make sure you’re graduating as many students as you can, it’s almost impossible.
OK, one more question about fish, since I hear you still go fly-fishing now and then. Have you ever thought that one of the beautiful things about fishing is that there’s really no algorithm for it?
There’s actually a lot of data out there about catching fish, what flies you should be using and where you should be fishing. But at the end of the day, that’s only going to help you so much. I certainly get skunked a lot when I’m out there on the river.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Eric Hoover writes about admissions trends, enrollment-management challenges, and the meaning of Animal House, among other issues. He’s on Twitter @erichoov, and his email address is eric.hoover@chronicle.com.
