University improves marketing results and increases matriculation

Wichita State University (WSU), one of six state universities in Kansas, is a Doctoral/Research Intensive institution offering more than 60 undergraduate, 57 master’s and 12 doctoral degree programs with an enrollment of more than 14,000 students.

The headache of incompatible data systems
WSU had more than 30 years of institutional data on students (admissions, enrollment, degrees, financial support, revenue, etc.). Unfortunately, it was housed in separate data “silos” (admissions office, registrar, account receivable, etc.), making it difficult to integrate data across units. Compounding the problem was the institution’s switch in 2006 to a different information system, which made data prior to the conversion incompatible with the new data systems. The institutional culture was to use data for day-to-day transactional operations rather than for analysis, forecasting or planning.

Promoting data-based decision making
Dr. David Wright, a sociology professor and WSU’s statistical project analyst, assembled a small team of developers who persuaded senior administrators that the institution would benefit from being able to predict future outcomes based on data rather than on tradition and intuition. “Our software programs could tell us ‘where we’ve been’ and ‘where we are now,’ but couldn’t tell us ‘where we’ll be in the future.’ For that we needed a more sophisticated program such as IBM SPSS Statistics that could provide predictive modeling,” said Wright.

Using IBM SPSS Statistics software, the team created predictive models that demonstrated how enrollment could be increased by targeting scholarship awards more effectively. The demonstration convinced administrators to invest in IBM SPSS Statistics - enabling administrators to make evidence-based decisions. Next, the university’s IT programmers were shown that IBM SPSS Statistics was robust software that would be compatible with their current technology and required little training and support.

The team convinced the programmers by showing them that the software could:
-- Dynamically extract data directly from WSU’s mix of in-house and third-party data storage applications
-- Extract larger volumes of data at a substantially faster rate than their current data extract program
-- Quickly upload data to existing tables and create new tables in both Microsoft® SQL Server and Oracle® databases
-- Automate tasks reliably – running syntax scripts to execute jobs and document activity
-- Automate job scheduling to protect production databases and optimize computing resources.

Generating standardized reports ... and smarter decisions
With IBM SPSS Statistics, the university can now generate standardized reports across campus, helping each administrative area make consistent, well informed decisions. Using predictive modeling, the institution has solid information on which students are most likely to enroll – so that the admissions can make the most of its marketing dollars. They are also increasing matriculation rates with models that show the types of candidates that will be helped most with scholarship funds. “The key is that IBM SPSS Statistics can perform data management, data analysis, data extraction, database construction, reporting and forecasting ... all in a single product,” said Wright.