New Product Release Feature Matrix (and How it Helps with Financial Aid)

By this point in the enrollment cycle your financial aid budget is set.

With appeals season looming, you may be asking yourself, “What could I have done better to prevent appeals?”

Simply put, did your initial strategy meet the needs of this incoming freshman class?

Evaluating appeals is a stressful time. Especially when you’re unsure if the financial aid you award will lead to the desired outcome and get you closer to your enrollment goals.

That’s why in our most recent release we launched our Matrix module.

It’s meant to help you develop a better plan and identify the resources to deliver against it, based on your performance in previous years.

As a result, you’ll be more likely to hit your enrollment goals and stay on budget without sacrificing academic quality or diversity of your incoming freshman class.

Keep reading below to find out more!

What is the Matrix Module?

The Matrix is a new module, inside our Predictive Analytics Platform for Higher Education here at Othot.

Its main goal is to help institutions craft strategic financial aid scholarship matrices powered by the existing custom models built for your institution using the Othot platform.

The Matrix module allows you to inform current institutional aid by examining previously matriculated students.

Why we built it (Why it needs to exist)

Our best ideas come from our customers. They asked for assistance in informing their institution’s financial aid before awards are given as well as throughout the cycle to enrollment, admissions on specific students that may be positively impacted by additional aid.

We understand how difficult a task it can be for institutions to accurately identify students that fit within your budget constraints without sacrificing other interests with the upcoming freshman class.

That way you’re not always relying on your ‘gut’ instinct or a static simplistic strategy created 9 months ago on these important decisions.

That way you can get all your desired results as it relates to numbered enrolled students as well as the desired shape for your incoming freshman class.

If you’re not doing so, you could be missing out on the high-quality students that want to attend your school but aren’t receiving enough aid.

Having a tool like this while evaluating appeals to smartly allocate your resources can be handy during this intense period.

What does it allow you to do?

Matrix allows users to easily create matrices to maximize total enrollment to inform them on what they’ll have to spend to achieve the desired results.

Therefore, you can see how budget, academic quality, and diversity goals would impact your class allowing you to develop your ideal financial aid strategy.

Take for example an institution wants to maintain average test scores and GPAs based as well as institutional budget.

Based on the above, what could have been the optimal outcome for that class based on financial aid allocation? Would this institution's results improve or worsen?

As you can see from the examples above, with a more effective financial aid strategy the institution could have improve the quantity AND the quality of the incoming freshman class.

Having a feature like this inside a predictive analytics platform allows you to do exactly what you see above to create the optimal financial aid strategy to meet (or exceed) your institution’s enrollment and strategic goals in a much easier fashion. In some cases, it can even confirm you had the most ideal financial strategy that you can confidently apply to future classes as well.

How does ‘Matrix’ work?

Othot’s machine learning models understand the Sensitivity of institutional aid offers made to previously matriculated students, so the platform is able to create offer amount scenarios automatically.

The Matrix can then yield the maximum expected enrollment for the lowest expected aid, all without compromising other strategic objects.

Let’s take a look at a Matrix where the school wants to make sure it is allocating the proper amount of aid to higher needs students.

How to get Matrix Optimization?

Matrix is an add-on feature to our existing Predictive Analytics Platform for Higher Ed institutions. If you’re interested in learning more about our platform you can fill out our contact us form or call (412) 458-4167 to speak to an analytics advisor, today!

Already an Othot customer? If you don’t see the module in your instance, please reach out to Othot Customer Success and we’ll be happy to assist in getting you set up!

If you’re a customer and have the Matrix module, but would like more information on using it, please refer to the Help Center for more information.