Giving Compass' Take:

• Using predictive analytics, Dara Byrne, administrator at John Jay College for Criminal Justice, investigated why so many older college seniors were not able to graduate and offered extra services and attention to these students. 

• How can other schools replicate this idea?   How can donor support be funneled to help older college students access the resources they need to graduate? 

• Learn about promise programs for adult learners. 

The John Jay College for Criminal Justice is known for training New York City’s future police officers and as Dara Byrne rose through the ranks of the college’s administration, she noticed a mystery right on her campus: why were 2,000 seniors, with only one year left to graduate, not enrolling in the fall?

In 2018, Byrne and her colleagues decided to play detective using predictive analytics, which tracks student data to predict who is likely to graduate or not.

Predictive analytics helped Byrne and her colleagues figure out which seniors were most likely to leave before getting their degrees. John Jay College sent more than 10 years of student data to a nonprofit organization, DataKind, and its data scientists figured out which attributes were associated with dropping out at the very end of a college career. Twenty-four data points, such as financial aid status, plus a dozen calculations, such falling grades, rose to the top as important indicators.

In the spring of 2018, DataKind returned a list of more than 1,100 rising seniors who were at risk of dropping out of school. Byrne hired three employees plus a student liaison to give these students extra academic advising and financial aid. Because 1,100 students created too large a caseload, the school especially focused on 380 students with the highest risk scores.

Byrne calls this level of advising “wildly intrusive” with advisers telephoning and forcing these high-risk students to come in for face-to-face meetings to learn about their problems. Many of the students had already spent more than four years in college and had exhausted their federal and state financial aid. Many had taken on more part-time work to pay for school.

Read the full article about helping college students get degrees by Jill Barshay at The Hechinger Report.