START SPREADING THE NEW: THE PEOPLE AND IDEAS RESHAPING HIGHER EDUCATION.

• Author: Cortellessa, Eric

American colleges and universities are known throughout the world for the innovations they nurture and produce, from breakthroughs in solar power, chemotherapy research, and touchscreen technology, to the creation of the spreadsheet. But when it comes to innovating internally--by changing their structure and design to better serve their students--they are notoriously hidebound. For example: nearly 30 percent of all undergraduates are now over the age of twenty-five, but the vast majority of college classes are still held during the workday, not on weekends and evenings when adults with full-time jobs can take them. This is one of the many ways in which colleges have not adapted to the changing needs of the average student.

That said, there's growing pressure on them to change, Students and parents are outraged by exorbitant tuition costs and the high levels of debt they have to take on; employers are frustrated by a mismatch between the skills they're looking for and the ones newly minted college graduates have cultivated; and policymakers are increasingly concerned about the huge number of students, mostly from modest backgrounds, who start college but don't finish, and are left with no credential that could help them get a good job to pay off their student debt. As a consequence, there's now more oxygen for higher education leaders who want to start doing things differently.

A few years ago, we began profiling in our annual College Guide the institutions and individuals--be they college presidents, academics, researchers, private-sector entrepreneurs, or lawmakers--who were coming up with innovative ways to make college work better, rather than helping universities increase their endowments and climb up the U.S. News & World Report rankings. This year, we take stock of how those ideas have progressed and spread, and what policymakers are doing to advance them.

Predictive Analytics

One of the biggest challenges facing higher education is the need to not just enroll more students, but keep them. Only around 40 percent of the students who enroll in college each year graduate in four years. (For students of modest means, the odds are even worse.) With such a high number of dropouts, institutions are under increasing pressure to help students persist until they earn a diploma. It turns out that the emergence of Big Data can help.

Georgia State University, in partnership with the consulting firm EAB, was one of the first universities to pioneer predictive analytics--the use of past data to forecast future behavior and design interventions to shape it--in an academic setting. The aim was to use troves of digital information to identify predictors of when a student was at risk of failing. The school found, for example, that if a student earned a C or lower in an introductory course for their chosen major, they were statistically less likely to graduate. So now, when that happens, an adviser will reach out and help the student identify another course of study with a better chance of success. In recent years, GSU's graduation rate has risen by more than 30 percent. Even more remarkably, the school has eliminated the racial achievement gap, and now awards more bachelor's degrees to African Americans than any other nonprofit college in the country.

Now, more than 5,000 schools are partnering with EAB and other firms to apply predictive analytics models to improve student outcomes and replicate Georgia State's success. One of the most innovative companies is Civitas Learning, based in Austin, Texas, which is now working with more than a dozen colleges, including the University of South Florida and Utah State. Civitas's basic thesis is that the best indicator of whether a student will graduate is not grades or test scores or demographics--it's their behavior. Habits like logging into their online class portal reflect engagement, which is what ultimately determines whether a student succeeds.

Predictive analytics isn't magic. It only works when a college uses the data as a basis for changing the way it interacts with students. The University of South Florida, for instance, which Civitas began working with in 2014, created a "persistence committee" representing different parts of the university--from faculty to student affairs--to meet weekly to review student data and identify red flags. For students who raise alarms, the committee dispatches an academic advocate to figure out what's going on and develop a remedy. It seems to be working. In 2011, USF's six-year graduation rate was 52 percent. Now it's 73 percent.

The Texting Revolution

While predictive analytics can identify students who need help, providing that help on a mass scale is expensive. It's simply not possible for most of the schools that serve lower-income students--which tend to be poorly funded open-access public universities and community colleges--to hire a lot more trained guidance counselors. And so the race is on in...