How to optimise student lifecycle management using SAS analytics

We have talked about the importance of SAS services in higher education. However, we have yet to address how SAS analytics addresses the administrative challenges that come with running a higher education institution.

As universities and colleges look to attract and retain top students, being more efficient in administrative operations can make a significant difference in the student lifecycle, making it easier to recruit and retain a suitable student body. SAS analytics can help higher education institutions optimise their operations to provide a better experience to students and improve recruitment, marketing, and administrative practices.

Improving administration using SAS analytics

To optimise administration across the student’s lifecycle, higher education institutions require analytics platforms that can integrate data from different sources, utilise advanced analytics to improve decision-making, and self-service analytics to give non-technical personnel access to data-driven insights.

Integrate data sources

Higher education institutions have vast amounts of data spread across different sources. To compensate, IT teams often stretch resources to provide support to different departments. The trade-off to this method of working is that it takes time to render information, making it difficult to pull off complex research in quick time because information can become redundant quickly.

Furthermore, most administrators don’t get the holistic perspective they need to make informed decisions, forcing them into a tunnel view when making decisions. SAS analytics can help higher education institutions work around this problem by integrating different data sources to provide a holistic perspective on the student’s lifecycle.

This added perspective makes it easy for decision-makers to identify stages where students tend to drop-out, making it easier to build strategies around maximising student retention.

Self-service analytics optimises the report creation process

Compiling reports can be a pain. Most administrative personnel don’t have the technical know-how to use complex IT systems, meaning that if they need to compile a report or make adjustments, they have to turn to the IT department to complete the process. This means tedious back and forth between two departments that reduce efficiency.

Self-service SAS Analytics puts powerful but accessible analytics platforms in the hands of people who need them, generating plenty of benefits. Self-service analytics eliminates the back and forth taking place between departments. Administrative personnel can explore data quickly and effectively, especially when it comes to student-related matters to discover underlying problems or opportunities to improve the student lifecycle.

Identifying current trends with advanced analytics

Advanced analytics like statistical analysis, machine learning, and data optimisation open up administrative personnel to analytical opportunities that were not possible before. Using advanced analytics platforms, administrative personnel can seek answers to large-scale trends taking place throughout the university.

Advanced analytics is key because it allows administrators to draw up significant questions about future trends. With advanced analytics, university administrators can anticipate trends about the student’s lifecycle and take steps to address any fallout. For example, by using advanced analytics, institutions can predict trends about graduation, drop-out, and other key questions regarding student life.

Once they find answers to these questions, administrative personnel can draw up plans to address the necessary pain points in the student lifecycle, while also simplifying administration operations.

Maximising student retention with the right tools

Clever use of SAS analytics allows higher education personnel to be more proactive and efficient in operations related to student recruitment, retention, and graduation. Some of these operations include devising sophisticated recruitment strategies, support for at-risk students, and streamlining administrative operations to ensure the department operates more efficiently than before. By using SAS analytics, universities and colleges can be more proactive when supporting students, making it easier to support at-risk students and making sure they graduate.

Better student lifecycle management with analytics

The key to optimising student lifecycle management lies in the higher education institution’s ability to support the student body in all aspects of their lives, like course enrollment and scheduling, which can only be done by streamlining administrative operations.

SAS analytics comes with advanced functions and sophisticated data management procedures to make the collection and analysis of data much easier to execute. With better data management strategies, it becomes much easier to discover flaws in student lifecycle management and take measures to fix them.

Furthermore, by using SAS analytics, it becomes much easier to plan out future objectives when it comes to student retention and recruitment, ensuring a student body that is content and well-supported.

To learn more about how SAS analytics can optimise student lifecycle management, check out out our higher education page. Selerity and SAS are offering a free whitepaper explaining how data visualisation, data integration, and advanced analytics can transform higher education.