Using Data to Guide Students to Successful Graduation and Careers

Video Transcript

Education is so meaningful and so impactful. The difference that it makes in somebody’s life is tremendous. Their ability to think, their ability to solve problems, their experience, what they’ve been exposed to, what they can think through, what they can reason and read—all of these things are so important, and not to mention the career preparation and then how they’re going to contribute to their own families and communities and societies.

Aiming for Academic Success

It’s so important. And yet, so many schools struggle with graduation rates, with students persisting all the way through school and then ultimately graduating, becoming productive, successful members of society. Why is that? Well, it could be a whole number of factors, right? It’s financial, it’s family, it’s grades, it’s academics, it’s something somewhere along the line that doesn’t work quite right for them.

I’ll tell you for me personally, I was always a good student in school except for math. Growing up . . . which is funny, I own a data and analytics company and I wasn’t good at math growing up, and somewhere along the line in elementary school, I missed some key foundational stuff in math that caused me problems for a long time. I got through math, but I didn’t always really understand how things worked. And it wasn’t until college that I then took some remedial math classes and I really learned math, and I really worked at it.

If the instructor assigned fifty problems, I worked a hundred, ’cause I was like, “I need to understand math.” And so finally I learned it, and it, of course, has been hugely beneficial in the rest of my career, doing data analysis, work. But I missed some things, right?

Decrease Risk with Data 

If somebody doesn’t have the support structure or something in place to then be able to say, “here’s what I need to do to make an adjustment to improve my life,” then they’re at risk of not graduating. At Data Crunch, we solve that problem. We help you use data and analytics that comes out of all your different systems and help you determine which students are at risk.

Who’s likely to struggle? What are they likely to struggle with? What kinds of interventions need to be taken to help them get on track? Maybe they need to go visit the math lab. Maybe they need to go visit the writing lab. Maybe they just need a call from an instructor or from a counselor that’s going to help them and talk them through how to schedule, how to work their financial aid. All of these sorts of things, they’re little tweaks and adjustments that can make major differences, but without the right information helping you target and prioritize who you talk to and what you say and how you help them, how do you ever solve that problem? But with the amount of big data that’s being produced and what we’ve got, we can help you know, at a super granular level of detail, who’s at risk who’s in need, how to help them.

Teach Beacon Can Help

That’s what we do. We’re going to help you improve these students’ lives, help them graduate, which of course then helps them in their lives after graduation and helps you and your university continue forward, stay viable, grow and achieve all the metrics that you desire to achieve.