share this
How Core BTS Helped a Community College Enhance Efficiencies to Help Grow Enrollment
Business Situation
In 2010, about 11 million students were enrolled at community colleges across the United States, according to the National Center for Education. But by 2021, that number had shrunk to 6.7 million. A combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and the trend of four-year flagship universities offering online campuses and other services similar to what community colleges offer have had a significant impact on two-year schools nationwide.
In the Midwest, a leading community college was not immune to this downward trend. The school, which serves about 14,000 students annually, has seen total enrollment across its three campuses and two regional centers dip since 2021.
As a result, in 2024 the school was seeking strategies to boost enrollment and wanted to better serve the community beyond simply running marketing campaigns. To achieve these goals, administrators thought they could attempt to re-engage former students who had left the college before earning their associate’s degree or technical diploma.
The college had a wealth of data about these past students that it wanted to turn into actionable insights. But the school’s staff was only able to sort the data manually, which was labor-intensive and time-consuming. The college wanted an efficient, cost-effective solution and needed a digital partner to help make it happen.
Our Solution
Presenting challenges for the community college was that its existing analytics solution wasn’t maintainable for the long-term and also was difficult to enhance in any significant way. Additionally, the platform was expensive due to the technology stack and how it was implemented. But with multiple upcoming initiatives on the horizon, the school’s leadership was seeking a solution that could enable them to continue utilizing the existing tech platform.
Leveraging the flexibility and dynamic skill set of our team at Core BTS, we’re capable of meeting a client’s needs in spite of business and technology constraints. We rolled up our sleeves and got to work.
In order to equip school administrators with the tools they needed to analyze, visualize, and share data across individuals and teams, we implemented a solution involving Microsoft Power BI and Azure Synapse.
Power BI provides a suite of software services and apps that work together to connect data from multiple sources, including Excel spreadsheets, cloud-based data warehouses, and on-premises hybrid data warehouses. With this platform, the administrators were empowered to easily connect their data sources and visualize information so they can identify what’s most important.
To help accelerate that time to insight, Core BTS also implemented Azure Synapse Analytics, which brings together the best of SQL technologies used in enterprise data warehousing, and Apache Spark technologies for big data.
The Results
Armed with data-informed insights, Power BI enabled school leaders to share this valuable information with anyone involved in the initiative to boost student enrollment.
The original data analytics solution wasn’t maintainable or able to grow with the school’s evolving needs. But thanks to our solution, Core BTS has helped reduce operating costs by 50 percent and improved the analytics team’s time to market. The community college is now able to automate its state reporting requirements, which previously was done by hand.
Additionally, the school now has the capability to have targeted conversations with prospects based on various student demographics and degree types rather than just using broad brush strokes. This allows for the college to craft tailored messages for individuals, rather than just make generic, impersonal attempts at contact.
Thanks to the new platform implemented by Core BTS, the school’s advisors and admissions team are no longer spending their time refining contact lists. Instead, thanks to the enhanced efficiencies, they are now able to focus on reaching out to students and establishing consistent, meaningful contact to help drive enrollment.