Whitepaper

Many colleges and universities are faced with ongoing declining enrollments and overall revenue.

A familiar predicament with college and university financial aid directors and budget managers is "how do we know how much financial aid will we pay out when we don't know which students will return?".

Colleges and universities are faced with the growing trend of becoming test optional or eliminating the use of test scores all together for admissions and awarding.

Higher Education institutions are facing financial pressures due to generally declining applicant pools, declining federal and state funding, and increasing skepticism over return on investment of higher education.

At Sightline, we believe that by looking at student success with a holistic lens, from enrollment through graduation, we can achieve the best outcomes.

Financial aid and tuition rates have an impact on long-term student retention that is understudied but should be proactively addressed.

For a variety of reasons, many institutions are considering adjusting their published tuition or net price. Inevitably this process will include re-structuring the institutional awarding matrix or criteria.

A challenge frequently faced by our clients are overly complex scholarship awarding strategies that do not yielding the anticipated number of students. Furthermore brand consistencies with awarding strategy can be hard to achieve.

Higher-ed institutions are consistently assessing their competitive advantages within the marketplace to enroll more students.

Individual academic departments aim to recruit and retain students, especially for programs that have growing career placement rates.

At Michigan Technological University, student retention rates were bouncing between 82% and 87%. The University success teams aimed to stabilize retention and focus on long term student success through predictive analytics.