CollegeAPP Releases New Models for Increased Efficiency in Fall ’22 Recruitment
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 6, 2022
Company’s data science team “starts from scratch” to include hundreds of additional datapoints into predictive models
[Los Angeles, CA, September 6, 2022]: CollegeAPP, the predictive analytics service for the higher education industry, has released new models for adult student recruitment as colleges and universities begin to lay out their plans for ongoing engagement with adult prospects. The models were published September 1 and CollegeAPP’s current partners are now deploying the data to further increase efficiency in their adult outreach strategies.
“This summer has been incredibly productive,” said CollegeAPP CEO Jack MacKenzie. “We increased our investment in surveys, data science and data modeling. It’s paid off in more robust, highly sensitive models that take into account hundreds of new data sources and provides our clients with enrollment intent and preference scores on more than 240 million adults.”
CollegeAPP’s data science team, Sean Godlewski and Michiel Besseling, spearheaded the company’s intensive five-month effort.
Sean Godlewski
CollegeAPP VP Digital/Client Service
“The acquisition of new person-level data sources at the state level was key to this effort,” Godlewski said, “that gave us the opportunity to run thousands of machine-learning simulations and evaluate the predictive value of each data point, compare them for accuracy, and run them again, in each state. We didn’t want to change out our models until we were sure they would provide increased efficiency while getting greater reach for our partners.”
Godlewski noted that CollegeAPP clients using the company’s data deployment and media placement services are seeing increased engagement rates with the new models. “We started deploying some of the new state models as we completed them this summer to ensure our clients were always working with the most up-to-date data. The results have been gratifying and it’s leading our clients to do more outreach because it works, and it is cost-effective.”
Michiel Besseling
CollegeAPP VP Analytics
Besseling, who joined the company in January, was instrumental in understanding how to improve the inclusivity of the CollegeAPP models. “If there was a nagging issue for me, it was the relatively high number of so-called ‘unknowns’ in the dataset,” Besseling said. “These are people for whom there wasn’t enough data for the algorithms to create scores, many of them under the age of 30. Instead of accepting that, we decided to solve for it by acquiring more data and appending it at the person-level. Of course, just having more data is not enough. That’s when the real work began to understand the relationship of the new data and gauge the predictive value of it. We started seeing improvements in late spring and solidified the work state-by-state since then.”
“Colleges and universities are beginning to plan for the demographic cliff,” MacKenzie noted. “We are seeing more and more focus on adults with intent for education and training, as well as increased interest in modifying past marketing and outreach practices to take advantage of CollegeAPP’s data.”
About CollegeAPP
CollegeAPP is a data analytics service for the higher education sector. CollegeAPP works with colleges and universities to identify and recruit potential students among the adult population. Using proprietary predictive analytics, CollegeAPPs live dashboard allows clients to dynamically create target audiences and launch marketing campaigns that efficiently and effectively boost recruitment and enrollment strategies. (www.yourcollegeapp.com)
