New Data Products Developed to Manage COVID Response

HOUGHTON, MI — Now more than ever, higher education needs to re-examine opportunities to leverage data, a readily available resource for all institutions. COVID has disrupted higher-ed in a way that was never expected. In response, SightLine has pivoted to support customers by releasing two new data products: a COVID Quantification analysis and a personalized Strategic Pricing and Competitive Marketplace Report.

Both of these new products are critical to navigating the next few months of 2020 as well as preparing for the fall 2021 enrollment cycle, which is just around the corner. COVID-19 has amplified financial pressures on your institution but we can use the data that your institution already has to navigate these new challenges.

Here is a brief look at SightLine’s new products:

SightLine’s COVID Quantification develops pre-and post-COVID models to compare how the magnitude and importance of enrollment factors are changing for your students. These results are invaluable to adjust 2021 recruitment strategies and to mitigate any enrollment hurdles identified in the data. We aim to help institutions understand:

• Has the threshold for ‘local’ changed?
• Is the caliber of student consistent with previous years?
• Has student price sensitivity changed?
• Has the impact of population density changed since students from urban areas may be more likely to attend rural schools?
• Have the odds of enrollment changed for particular ethnicities as this may indicate branding or cultural challenges?

Additionally, published prices, net prices, and discount rates reached an all-time high leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many institutions have discussed tuition changes and new financial aid award strategies in the past. The pandemic disruption has accelerated the need to create new strategies to better serve students while increasing university sustainability. SightLine’s Strategic Pricing and Competitive Marketplace Report is personalized to each institution’s data and provides a basis for answering questions such as:

• Should we increase our published price or consider a tuition reset?
• Should we increase our discount rate and if so, by how much?
• What happens if we don’t change and continue with current trends?
• How much do we need to adjust our published or net prices to make an impact on yield rates?

We were looking to better understand our position in the marketplace so that we could ’move the needle’ to become more attractive with our offerings and more affordable at the same time. SightLine helped us considerably. Their work was thorough, insightful, and provided us the depth of analysis we were looking for. Moreover, they were timely. In short, both effective and efficient. Double thumbs up!

• VP of Enrollment at St. Ambrose University

At SightLine, we have focused on assessing the higher education marketplace as a whole to help colleges and universities to optimize student yield rates, retention rates, and net tuition revenue. This assessment included in the pricing report is based on each institution’s top competitors, the overall marketplace from the given institution’s region, and trends over time.

We take these complex challenges — pricing, budgeting, communications, and more — to develop data derived strategies for targeted recruitment, enrollment, and retention. We help manage the implementation for you during this unprecedented time and beyond as a new paradigm emerges.

Originally published at https://sightlinedata.com.