In today’s competitive higher ed landscape, retention is critical for maintaining headcount and meeting revenue goals. It can be difficult to predict how and why a student might persist at your institution, and the answer often lies in a multitude of key factors—many of which are known prior to a student officially enrolling.
We asked Robina Schepp, Vice President for Enrollment and Placement at Pace University, about how her team is using MARKETview’s integrated and comparative data to identify those key factors for attrition risk earlier to help achieve their institutional objectives.
Over the past six years, Pace’s top area of focus has been retention. They set their target rate in 2019 and were making steady progress—until the pandemic arrived and completely disrupted the status quo in higher ed. Since then, the Pace team has been looking to data to help uncover their biggest opportunities for achieving their retention goals.
Schepp reflected on the primary question they wanted to answer when examining their retention data:
“To what extent are our retention problems related to who we’re admitting and enrolling, and how is it related to the actual experience of students when they get on campus?”
-Robina Schepp
Schepp’s team filtered MARKETview’s Comparative Retention Report through various pre-enrollment indicators to pinpoint the segments of their pool where they wanted to grow, and the populations that tended to have lower retention rates. She explained how this data has helped their team make safer and smarter decisions about recruitment and admissions.
“MARKETview has enabled us to work on those factors and move on segments that present less risk for the university and less risk for our overall enrollment.”
-Robina Schepp
Their retention strategy has evolved to include the use of several dimensions in MARKETview, including geographic, academic, financial, and inquiry timing data to establish a clearer picture of each students’ likelihood to retain.
If you have goals surrounding retention, revenue, enrollment, or any other key metrics, schedule a demo with our team to find out how MARKETview can help you achieve them.