It’s that critical time of year. Winter vacations are over and you’re hard at work driving toward your enrollment goals. You’re probably comparing this year’s progress to last year’s or to internal benchmarks. You may have prospective students in various lifecycle phases, and you’re trying to figure out:
- how to transition more inquiries/prospects;
- how to better engage more applicants to grow interest; and
- how to allocate the perfect amount of aid, keeping within your budgetary constraints to influence admits to deposit.
All of this can be extremely time consuming and perhaps a bit frustrating. But there is something that can support you through these difficult times: Othot’s advanced predictive and prescriptive analytics platform. We’re helping higher education institutions that are facing the same problems you are, and we have some examples to show you how.
- Customers are still using the predicted likelihood scores at the prospect and inquiry phase to understand how to prioritize resources. When recruiters schedule high school visits or make calls, they are using the individual likelihood scores from Othot’s platform to prioritize their efforts. Recruiters see the value because they are getting a higher rate of return for their efforts.
- Customers are continuing to use Othot’s prescriptive “What-if” functionality to understand how an applicant’s likelihood score may be influenced by marketing materials or campus visits. In some cases, customers achieved such a significant impact with campus engagements that Othot’s prescriptive modeling has helped them to identify which students to offer travel vouchers to drive increased engagement at these events.
- Customers are also taking advantage of our newest feature “Sensitivity” to inform their aid award offers. Not all individuals fit into a perfect financial aid matrix. Sensitivity enables schools to look at an individual’s characteristics (e.g. SAT or GPA) to understand their sensitivity to incremental aid offers. Customers are using this prescriptive feature for initial financial aid offer evaluations, throughout their appeals process, and even to disburse final incentive awards.
Othot can also help you see how your enrollment class is taking shape. Through predictive analysis, we visualize the progress made to date across the enrollment lifecycle phases. More importantly, through prescriptive analysis, we indicate how your enrollment class will unfold and if you will meet your goal from the balance of activities still to occur.
So, if you’re interested to learn more about the Othot platform, how we are helping our current customers through this critical time of year, or just need someone to vent to until you have a predictive analytics tool at your disposal, please reach out to me at zjvarga@othot.com.
