Client Question: Where should we advertise to increase enrollment for existing schools, or to increase awareness for new school launches?

Approach:  WP goes beyond advertising data from Facebook and Google to find zip codes where our clients should be targeting advertising.  We combine data on income, demographics, and psychographics with the locations of existing schools and existing students, the point of which is to show which zips are underpenetrated with students so that clients can direct more advertising to those zips.

Client Question: How many applications must we receive in order to fully enroll our school?

Approach: Using historical data from our client’s school, Webster Pacific creates models for predicting how many applications a campus must receive in order to meet its target enrollment. These models include metrics such as acceptance rate, yield, and erosion. In the example, notice how yield decreases and erosion increases the farther away students live from school.  We advise our client to decrease acceptance rates for students living far from campus for this reason.

Client Question: Who are our main competitors, where are they located, and what does that tell us about the education market?

Client Question: How can we measure our students’ learning progress?

Approach: WP helps schools build dashboarding systems so that teachers can track individual student’s progress, and so that school leadership can track grade and school-wide academic progress.  We train all teachers and leadership on how to use the systems and provide supporting documentation.

Client Question: What will our enrollment be, by school and by grade, next year so we can budget appropriately?

Approach: WP studies cohort survival, external data, and attrition-based models to understand which best predicts future enrollment by studying our client’s historical enrollment data.  This example is a piece of the attrition model that we use to predict enrollment for a particular school.  To do so, we study the historical attrition rates via withdrawals, transfers, and dropouts.  We use this data to predict enrollment, by grade, for the following year (highlighted in orange).

Client Question: How can we increase capacity utilization by managing our waitlists?

Approach: WP studies historical attrition, especially over the summer, and uses that data to make recommendations on the number of students to admit in the spring so that when future attrition and yield are considered, the school will be enrolled to a higher capacity utilization.