Short summary:
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Higher education is moving from reactive support to proactive intervention by prioritizing leading indicators (early alert data) over lagging metrics (retention rates) to enable immediate action.
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Institutions must adapt to the New Majority learner and move beyond vanity metrics to focus on data points that drive behavioral change and persistence.
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Effectively utilizing data requires breaking down departmental silos to create cross-functional alignment, allowing for unified, real-time outreach and high-touch human intervention.
Higher education is navigating a fundamental pivot from reactive support to proactive intervention. To remain resilient, Student Success leaders must look past traditional, reflective data analysis to identify the specific, early indicators that actually drive persistence.
In a recent roundtable, we were joined by Sarah Jurden, Assistant Vice President for Student Success at Bowling Green State University and Heather Chapman, Senior Director for Data and Analytics at Weber State University.
Together, they explored how to humanize data, bypass vanity metrics, and bridge the imaginary silos that often stand in the way of student outcomes.
Why leading indicators are so important
The most significant takeaway from the discussion was the necessity of prioritizing leading indicators over lagging data.
While retention and graduation rates are essential truths, they are fundamentally lagging. They tell you a student has struggled only after it is too late to intervene.
To change the narrative, institutions must focus on data points that allow for immediate action:
- Early intervention flags: Tracking early alert flags, first-week attendance, and whether a student has attended their initial advising appointments.
- The digital footprint: Monitoring logins to the Learning Management System (LMS) as a real-time pulse on student engagement.
- Day by day enrollment: Reviewing daily enrollment changes compared to the previous year to immediately assess the effectiveness of outreach efforts.
By focusing on these leading moments, staff can pivot from analyzing failure to facilitating success.
As Sarah Jurden noted, this focus allows institutions to deploy human capital precisely where it is needed; focusing outreach on the students who haven't completed a key action, rather than wasting resources on those who are already on the right path.
How to move beyond vanity data to increase student engagement
A core challenge across countless sectors, education included, is the trap of vanity metrics. This data may look impressive in a report but it fails to improve lives. Our panellists suggested a number of ways to move beyond this, by focussing on metrics that move the needle.
- Event conversion vs. event attendance: Simply counting heads at an event is a vanity exercise. A more meaningful metric is conversion, namely how many of those attendees subsequently joined a student organization or took a follow-up action that deepened their sense of belonging.
- Action oriented compliance: Rather than reporting on how many students have registered in total, data collection should focus on identifying the specific individuals who haven't completed a required action (such as registering by a certain date). This allows staff to ignore compliant students and focus their limited human capital on those who need intervention.
How to support the New Majority learner
The enrollment cliff is better described as an enrollment shift. Today’s student body is increasingly composed of New Majority learners.
These non-traditional students encompass those with significant financial needs, working students and students navigating mental health challenges like anxiety and depression.
The panel highlighted two initiatives that have helped them drive success across these particular cohorts:
- The Wildcat Scholars program: Predictive modeling revealed that students placed in both developmental Math and English were at the highest risk. Weber State responded with a guided program offering a structured first-year experience and on-campus jobs, which dramatically increased student belonging.
- The engagement tracker: To operationalize the link between engagement and retention, BGSU categorizes students into tiers. The goal isn't just to track participation, but to actively move students into higher tiers of institutional engagement.
How to break departmental data silos
The roundtable concluded with a powerful reminder, departmental silos are often artificial. The imaginary boundaries between Academic Affairs, Student Services, and Financial Aid can prevent insights from becoming action.
Heather Chapman’s approach at Weber State offers a blueprint for cross-campus alignment through “The Weekly Scrum”. This 30-minute weekly meeting brings together registrars, financial aid officers, and marketing teams to review enrollment numbers and coordinate immediate, unified outreach.
The lesson for all Student Success leaders is clear; work with the willing.
Do not wait for a campus-wide mandate to begin sharing insights. Start by collaborating with those eager to use data, and use those early wins to prove that when an institution works as one unified network, student outcomes inevitably improve.
