Last week we outlined how the University of West Georgia, with a little help from their higher education chatbot powered by EdSights, tackled mental health by connecting students to resources to help balance their physical and mental wellness. These interventions led to a 20% decrease in student-reported mental health challenges.
Another driver impacting student persistence, and mental health, is a student’s overall satisfaction with the institution. Naturally, if students are unhappy with their surroundings this can negatively impact their motivations and overall well being.
As part of our Satisfaction Check, we asked more than 200,000 students if they were satisfied with their current institution. In this mini-series to round out Mental Health Awareness Month, we will focus on how specific institution types look at these responses and proactively address challenges impacting student satisfaction.
One of our small private college partners*, with the help of their AI chatbot powered by EdSights, reached out to more than 1,000 enrolled students asking them to rate their satisfaction with the institution. While 90% of respondents indicated a positive or neutral response, 10% of students indicated they were not satisfied in some way.
What Can the Satisfaction Check Uncover?
This college’s AI chatbot helps to identify individual students who have issues impacting their satisfaction with the institution. This equips faculty and staff with specific insights into each student’s concern.
At our partner institution, challenges facing students varied from seemingly simple fixes like WIFI in a residence hall to changes in course offerings. Because students speak more openly to a bot than with individual humans, the AI chatbot helps them to uncover these challenges, connects students to resources, and notifies staff which students are in need of more direct follow-up.
Satisfaction is one of the sub-drivers of risk that EdSights measures under engagement with this college. By asking these questions hundreds of thousands of times and looking at student outcomes for respondents, our machine learning model identified satisfaction with the institution as one of the most reliable predictors of persistence.
*Note: This week we are anonymizing the partner out of respect for the privacy of sensitive data related to student satisfaction on their campus.
What’s Next?
While we may be approaching the end of Mental Health Awareness Month, feelings of satisfaction will continue to have a huge impact on a student’s decision to remain enrolled at their institution. We’ll keep tackling topics impacting mental health by leveraging data from our weekly check-ins across all of our partners.
Solving the college completion crisis
Institutions who partner with EdSights between now and August 1, 2022 have the opportunity to join the largest scale persistence study in history. The goal is to uncover new trends and insights around the factors driving completion across the nation, and provide participants with real-time insights on their specific students.
On top of providing participants with key insights for their campus and national benchmarks, students enrolled at participating institutions will benefit from our AI persistence framework that connects them to personalized resources over SMS.
With the study’s findings, we will release a new annual report to serve as the nation’s first benchmark for student persistence and retention. The report will be released next fall at our inaugural client summit.
For institutions who are in the early stages of their persistence strategic planning, or for those looking to enhance their current efforts, we hope the study will provide a data driven foundation fueled by the voices and experiences of their students.