Tag: Impact

  • From Recruitment to Retention: The Impact of AI on Higher Education

    From Recruitment to Retention: The Impact of AI on Higher Education

    Artificial intelligence is influencing every aspect of the higher education experience, from recruitment strategies to long-term student success. Community college, undergraduate, and graduate programs use advanced analytics to predict outcomes, optimize operations, enhance decision-making, and improve the student experience. However, the opportunities and challenges associated with using AI in higher education require careful strategic planning. By understanding AI’s evolving role in enrollment management and retention, higher education leaders can now support students and strengthen institutional outcomes more effectively than ever. 

    Is your institution keeping pace or lagging behind when it comes to educational technology? Liaison’s new whitepaper—From Recruitment to Retention: The Impact of AI on Higher Education—will help you answer that question and begin learning to plan for a better future.  

    Insights include practical tips about AI technology, such as: 

    • Applying AI Strategically 

    Institutions that apply AI tools thoughtfully have the ability to improve processes and results in areas including admissions, student success, and retention. From innovative yield strategies to predictive analytics tailored for community colleges and grad schools, AI is already driving better outcomes by providing higher education institutions with roadmaps for achieving institutional goals and improving student outcomes. 

    • Addressing AI Challenges and Ethical Considerations 

    While the widespread adoption of AI tools in higher ed promises advancements in innovation, efficiency, and the management of student data, it also introduces complex challenges and ethical dilemmas that demand attention. From concerns about data privacy and algorithmic bias to questions surrounding accountability and the societal impact of automation, the rapid rise of AI tools in higher education institutions requires thoughtful, responsible oversight. As the whitepaper explains, that involves exploring the nuances of AI development and implementation, examining the ethical principles at stake, and creating frameworks that prioritize fairness, transparency, and the well-being of individual students and the institutions that serve them. 

    • Achieving Data Readiness 

    Data readiness is essential for strategic enrollment management, allowing colleges and universities to harness AI to make informed decisions that drive success. For starters, creating a data-informed institution involves navigating the overwhelming influx of information to uncover actionable insights while building data literacy among every key stakeholder on campus. By achieving data readiness, educators can align their efforts with student learning needs, improve outcomes, and create a sustainable path forward. 

    It seems like everyone is talking about artificial intelligence and its potential to redefine not just student learning, but the future of higher education itself. But how well do you understand and speak the language of AI? Although much of the language that now informs conversations about innovation and success wasn’t familiar to most people just a few years ago, it’s now mission critical for you and your peers to begin learning how to embrace AI literacy. 

    Envisioning the Future of AI in Higher Education 

    As its capabilities and applications grow in the years ahead, AI will continue to provide new opportunities for colleges and universities to enhance decision making, streamline operations, emphasize academic integrity, and provide predictive insights that guide future strategies. The ongoing integration of AI throughout higher education will apply new scientific insights to holistic application evaluation, personalized student communications, and enrollment workflow automation, among other endeavors.  

    The future of AI in education promises even more sophisticated tools to come, which will further personalize and secure the admissions process. Looking ahead, one thing is clear: Today’s higher education leaders have an unprecedented opportunity to foster greater student success and institutional growth by embracing AI as a tool to help inform their decisions.  

    To learn how to get started, download From Recruitment to Retention: The Impact of AI on Higher Education today.  

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  • What gets misunderstood in the quest for policy impact

    What gets misunderstood in the quest for policy impact

    Academics are obsessed with impact. We want our research to be read, to be cited by other academics – and particularly in the social sciences and humanities, to have an impact on government policy.

    Partly this is because internationally over the last forty years, governments have increasingly imposed an impact agenda on universities, using financial and other levers to encourage them to focus on the real-world impact of what goes on in the ivory tower. But it’s not just that. Most academics are really passionate about the work they do, see it as important, and want it to make a difference to the public and society.

    Yet it seems that a lot of the time, that desire to have impact is much more of an aspiration than a reality. When I had just started in academia (at another institution), after working in the IT industry and then as a school teacher, I remember going to a meeting about the department’s research strategy. There were lots of speeches from academics about all the amazing work they were doing (or thought they were doing) – and then one brave colleague spoke up and said that research was a waste of time, as it just meant spending lots of energy on something that maybe ten people around the world would read. He was much more interested in teaching, and the real direct impact he could have on his students right there and then. Quite.

    Tracing impact

    Of course research does have impact, although often it’s much easier to see it in the hard sciences and medicine. The revolutionary impact of the work of Samuel Broder at the National Cancer Institute in the US, and his collaborators, in the 1990s that led to the introduction of retroviral treatments for HIV, comes to mind as one example. I worked as a technical analyst on an HIV/AIDS unit in London in the 1990s and I saw the miraculous impact of this on people’s lives.

    But in the social sciences tracing the path of impact is often much less clear. However, often this is not because the potential for impact is not there, but due to other factors, particularly a lack of understanding between government and academia about how research can usefully intercalate with policy development. Because I was interested in the relationship between research and policy, I undertook a secondment in the insights and research team of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), for 15 months up to October 2023.

    Since then, I have been involved in an ongoing series of conversations, initiated by Ofsted, involving academic and government colleagues on the topic of how to facilitate better communications between government and academia about the role and impact of research. Most recently we held a very well attended symposium at the British Educational Research Association conference in Manchester in September 2024, and are planning other publications and events.

    What’s getting misunderstood

    So far, based on these discussions, we have identified a number of factors that tend not be given enough weight in the relationship between government and academia.

    First – and this is something I saw first-hand at Ofsted – it is important to realise that government does value evidence arising from academic research. Although many academics are unaware of this, each government department has members of what is known as the Government Social Research Profession, whose role is to champion social research evidence and support implementation and evaluation of government policy.

    Another thing I came to understand at Ofsted is that the culture is quite different to academia. The role of research in the civil service is to support the aims of democratically elected ministers. Research evidence is valued in government – but it is one factor among others when decisions are made.

    Linked to this, such evidence has to be provided at the right time and in the right way so that it can have an influence on those decisions. This is something that academics often lack awareness of. Typical academic research projects often focus on making sure that their findings are high quality and robust, and only then think about pathways to dissemination, hoping that someone in government will take notice of it. All too often that can mean, as my old colleague said, that it ends up being read only by other academics. Academics need to be scanning the horizon to find pathways to engagement from really much earlier on in their research, for example in the context of public consultations, or political debates.

    Other areas we have identified also include, on occasion, misconceptions and mistrust between academia and government, which is there on both sides. Civil servants often handle competing priorities and demands, which can hinder opening up lines of communication to the research community about how they use research and to engage in honest conversations about political priorities.

    Although things are changing for the better in England in this regard, as evidenced by our collaboration between Ofsted and academic colleagues, there is much more to do. We have adopted the concept of a “third space”, opportunities for engagement where we can find new ways of working across sectors that promote mutual understanding, in the case of Ofsted, to better promote outcomes for children and young people. This is of course the shared aim of both the academic research community and government.

    However, this is something that is needed not just at Ofsted, but across government and across academia. The impact agenda is not going anywhere anytime soon, and perhaps we would be foolish to want it to, but making it work better has got to be a priority.

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  • Poor Harvard Numbers Show Impact of SCOTUS Affirmative Action Ruling

    Poor Harvard Numbers Show Impact of SCOTUS Affirmative Action Ruling

    No one feels like confirming nor denying how affirmative action’s death is destroying a sense of inclusion in higher ed.Emil Guillermo

    But make no mistake, the destruction is under way. 

    Harvard College sent out letters to its early admits, but hasn’t disclosed what the demographics are yet for this year. Waiting until all the admits are sent out in the Spring buys them time to make excuses. But Harvard Law has issued its numbers and the alarm bells should be going off. There were just 19 first year Black students, 3.4 percent of the Harvard Law school class, according to data from the American Bar Association, as reported by the New York Times. It’s the lowest number since the 1960s, a period when affirmative action and civil rights was much more in vogue. 

    Woke wasn’t considered a disease back then. People were interested in fighting racist segregation. Inclusion and diversity weren’t institutionalized notions back then. They were the values we hoped would take us out of the darkness. But compare this years 19 Harvard Law admits with the 43 admits from the previous year, and you see the wounds have been reopened. David Wilkins, a Harvard Law professor who has kept tabs on these matters told the Times it was related to the Supreme Court ruling, and its “chilling effect.”

    Since the 60s, the numbers have been around 50-70 a year. And then came this year’s 19. Hispanic students were also lower at 39, 6.9 percent of the class versus 63 students or 11 percent of the class in 2023.

    The big winners in the admissions at Harvard Law? Whites and Asian American students, the latter, the principal plaintiffs in the suit before the court last year.

    Now that we have diminished the game to numbers, the numbers don’t lie. When you can’t address the need of inclusion directly, we leave it up to chance. 

    This year at Harvard Law was not a good year. Harvard miscalculated by not settling with the anti-affirmative action SFAA front and going to court. But that allowed for a right-wing Supreme Court to set the precedent for all schools not just Harvard. Anti-affirmative action advocates will try to put a positive spin on the low numbers, saying it’s not as low as it sounds. They’ll talk about different recording standards set by the A.B.A. There’s also the issue of multi-race students, and those who decline to state. 

    But secretly opponents of affirmative action are gleeful. They got their way. Their court. And last November their president, elected by voters who believe that educational attainment, not race nor class, is the new dividing line in America. The less education the better. Who needs affirmative action?  Let that sink in academia.

    Consider the Harvard Law School numbers the first of many signs to come that will let us know just how fast we are an America in reverse.

    Emil Guillermo is a journalist, commentator, and former adjunct professor. 

     

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  • Impact of Technology on Student Retention Report

    Impact of Technology on Student Retention Report

    A report from your end users

    In partnership with Inside Higher Ed, Collegis surveyed 450 students to gauge the impact of higher education technology on both their learning experiences and opinions of the school. Higher ed leaders will want to read our report, “Tech Troubles: How Technology-Student Interactions Impact Retention,” to dive deeper into how technology environments can help (or hinder) the student journey.

    Students raise high-stakes concerns

    While our study indicates colleges and universities are succeeding in some aspects of technology usage (digital communications, for one), the results also exposed several areas where technology hurdles are damaging, or even disastrous, to the student experience:

    • Website application hurdles: A quarter of students report some level of difficulty.
    • No internet, no class? Technical issues cause distractions and lost class time, both on and off campus.
    • Retention at risk: Over 40% of students who experienced tech issues question whether to continue their education at the institution.

    Plus! Included in the report are reactions to the findings from higher ed leaders. They share the top challenges their schools face in addressing the issues raised by students.

    Download the report for summaries by topic, stand-out results from audience segments, charts that show the intensity of student sentiment, and recommendations for technology investments to improve student success.

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  • Anticipating Impact of Educational Governance – Sijen

    Anticipating Impact of Educational Governance – Sijen

    It was my pleasure last week to deliver a mini-workshop at the Independent Schools of New Zealand Annual Conference in Auckland. Intended to be more dialogue than monologue, I’m not sure if it landed quite where I had hoped. It is an exciting time to be thinking about educational governance and my key message was ‘don’t get caught up in the hype’.

    Understanding media representations of “Artificial Intelligence”.

    Mapping types of AI in 2023

    We need to be wary of the hype around the term AI, Artificial Intelligence. I do not believe there is such a thing. Certainly not in the sense the popular press purport it to exist, or has deemed to have sprouted into existence with the advent of ChatGPT. What there is, is a clear exponential increase in the capabilities being demonstrated by computation algorithms. The computational capabilities do not represent intelligence in the sense of sapience or sentience. These capabilities are not informed by the senses derived from an organic nervous system. However, as we perceive these systems to mimic human behaviour, it is important to remember that they are machines.

    This does not negate the criticisms of those researchers who argue that there is an existential risk to humanity if A.I. is allowed to continue to grow unchecked in its capabilities. The language in this debate presents a challenge too. We need to acknowledge that intelligence means something different to the neuroscientist and the philosopher, and between the psychologist and the social anthropologist. These semiotic discrepancies become unbreachable when we start to talk about consciousness.

    In my view, there are no current Theory of Mind applications… yet. Sophia (Hanson Robotics) is designed to emulate human responses, but it does not display either sapience or sentience.

    What we are seeing, in 2023, is the extension of both the ‘memory’, or scope of data inputs, into larger and larger multi-modal language models, which are programmed to see everything as language. The emergence of these polyglot super-savants is remarkable, and we are witnessing the unplanned and (in my view) cavalier mass deployment of these tools.

    Three ethical spheres Ethical spheres for Governing Boards to reflect on in 2023

    Ethical and Moral Implications

    Educational governing bodies need to stay abreast of the societal impacts of Artificial Intelligence systems as they become more pervasive. This is more important than having a detailed understanding of the underlying technologies or the way each school’s management decides to establish policies. Boards are required to ensure such policies are in place, are realistic, can be monitored, and are reported on.

    Policies should already exist around the use of technology in supporting learning and teaching, and these can, and should, be reviewed to ensure they stay current. There are also policy implications for admissions and recruitment, selection processes (both of staff and students) and where A.I. is being used, Boards need to ensure that wherever possible no systemic bias is evident. I believe Boards would benefit from devising their own scenarios and discussing them periodically.

     

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