What Structured Data Analysis Can Reveal About Your School

Your School’s Data Ecosystem

Schools generate a lot of data, everything from academic performance and enrollment patterns to financial records. While this amount of data can sometimes feel overwhelming, structured and well-organized data can be an incredibly powerful tool. With the right analytics platforms, data warehouses, and predictive models, you can gain deeper insights and make smarter decisions.

While every school’s setup looks different, a modern data setup often includes a centralized data warehouse (like Snowflake or BigQuery), ETL tools (such as Apache Airflow or dbt), and API integrations that bring in data from your SIS, LMS, and financial systems.

Let’s take a closer look at what types of insights a setup like this can offer.

Enrollment Analytics

Each enrollment cycle gives schools valuable data about both new and returning students. This information helps track trends over time and gives you a better picture of your funnel efficiency and how effective your retention efforts are.

With a well-integrated data framework, your school can:

• See how engagement efforts connect to retention rates through regression models
• Pinpoint where families drop out of the admissions process using funnel analysis
• Use predictive models like logistic regression or decision trees to anticipate enrollment shifts and improve outreach

Financial Intelligence

Being financially sound today means more than just reviewing past budgets. Schools are now applying statistical and machine learning tools to their financial data to uncover insights they can act on in real time.

Here are some key questions you can explore with structured data:

• How does your current cash flow stack up against projections using time-series forecasting?
• Are tuition delinquencies rising in particular groups, based on clustering analysis?
• What’s the variance between actual and budgeted net tuition revenue using variance analysis?
• Are financial aid dollars supporting both access and academic performance, as measured by outcomes?
• How resilient is your budget in different scenarios like inflation or enrollment dips, using simulations such as Monte Carlo simulations?

Community Data Governance

Beyond the business office, schools need to track population data to support equity, allocate resources effectively, and stay ahead of emerging needs. That’s where a strong data governance framework comes in. It should include things like data quality checks, access controls, and compliance with privacy laws like FERPA and GDPR.

With good governance, you can:

• Analyze attendance by grade to spot patterns using anomaly detection
• Map behavioral incidents to identify training needs or environmental factors
• Track academic performance across student groups to evaluate program impact through cohort analysis
• Review parent engagement data to fine-tune communication and increase participation with segmentation models

Strategic Data Utilization

To avoid drowning in too much data, it’s important to have a clear governance plan that connects your data practices to your school’s goals. This involves:

• Setting KPIs across departments that align with your mission
• Making sure your student information system, LMS, and financial systems work together seamlessly
• Training your team on data literacy, ethical use of data, and how to interpret dashboards

One emerging solution to help with this is FACTS Data Insights, our new centralized analytics platform (currently in beta).  Built on a Snowflake data warehouse, it brings together disparate datasets from your school’s existing FACTS solutions and turns them into easy-to-understand dashboards that support smarter decisions. The FACTS Data Science team is continuously uncovering new insights and turning them into actionable visuals for school leaders.

The short version? With FACTS Data Insights, you’ll be able to make confident, informed decisions based on your school’s unique data story.

To learn more, reach out to your FACTS account manager for information on how to implement in your school!