Othot Unveils New Features to Help Colleges Optimize Financial Aid and Enrollment

PITTSBURGH, PA (October 13, 2021) — Othot, a Liaison International company and developer of a popular predictive and prescriptive analytics platform for colleges and universities, today announced the launch of new features and product enhancements designed to help colleges and universities achieve their enrollment goals, including shaping their classes, supporting DE&I, and maximizing the impact of financial aid strategies.

“The impact of the pandemic on student finances, enrollment, and student success has created a heightened sense of urgency to access advanced analytics to make more informed decisions,” said Andy Hannah, president of Othot. “This work is about helping institutions harness the power of data and predictive modeling to understand the student better, identify ways to leverage limited resources, and shape a class consistent with their missions and values.”

Because of the effects of the pandemic, student enrollment declined at many institutions, marking the largest single decrease in at least a generation, and causing existing equity gaps to widen. In parallel, the nationwide student retention rate dropped by a full percentage point, and student financial hardship and basic needs insecurity has increased significantly due to job and family income loss.

With the launch of its new product features, Othot has introduced a set of powerful capabilities to help institutions better understand what’s driving enrollment and retention. Institutions can now use Othot’s enhanced Waterfall Impact Values to see more clearly which factors are driving enrollment and retention up or down and by how much. These insights help to overcome assumptions and inform high-impact enrollment and student success decisions.

The new product enhancements also put more customization control into the hands of institutional leaders. New menus have been created to select specific variables to create real-time data visualizations, while custom grouping buckets enable higher education professionals and staff to group students based on ranges of values within variables, such as GPA.

Using Othot’s new year-over-year comparison functionality in the Pivot Table feature, institutions can more easily understand how student subgroups are performing this year compared to years prior. The Matrix feature, which enables institutions to test and simulate new financial aid strategies, now details the difference between the before and after impact of student aid on enrollment and retention.

“I am consistently impressed with Othot’s commitment to innovation and increased functionality for its users,” said Kelly Liocano, executive director of student financial aid at Ashland University, a private nonprofit university in northeast Ohio. “Each release continues to put tools and data easily at our fingertips for convenient consumption, distribution, and timely decision making...The new features have been a game changer, saving time and providing greater insights to support our enrollment and financial aid strategy.”

As a key part of Liaison’s Total Enrollment^SM offering, Othot’s capabilities can be integrated alongside a wide range of other products, applications, and workflow tools from Liaison and other technology providers. Total Enrollment creates a prospect-to-alumni solution to help institutions bridge the various solutions silos, navigate these challenges, and best support their students. The offering helps institutions to recruit and graduate a more diverse class, using features and functionality from across the Liaison family of products and a dynamic set of planning, analytics, outreach and communication tools and services.

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About Othot: Othot is the leader in artificial intelligence and prescriptive analytics solutions for higher education institutions across the United States. Othot focuses on each school’s specific enrollment, retention, student success, and alumni engagement goals. Othot’s cloud-based software provides continuous intelligence in real-time and empowers schools to engage each prospective, current, and former student with the right tactic at the right time. To learn more, visit othot.com.

About Liaison International: Through a powerful combination of technology and services, Liaison helps over 31,000 undergraduate, graduate and postbac programs across more than 1,500 campuses achieve their recruitment, admissions, enrollment and student success goals. Liaison’s campaign management, enrollment and recruitment tools include TargetX and the Enrollment Marketing Platform (EMP) as well as its Centralized Application Service (CAS™), SlideRoom and Time2Track. To learn more, visit liaisonedu.com and find us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.