Cara Skikne

Predicting future enrolments

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How do we know that Studyportals’ pageviews data is representative of real-world higher education demand? And how do we know page views are actually a predictor of future enrolments? The short answer: we know because we’ve run the numbers.

We’ve established a strong correlation between Studyportals data and enrolments 12-24 months into the future, time and time again. This is not an arbitrary timeframe – it is the average length of the student journey across our platforms.

Many enrolment datasets provide a backward-looking perspective on higher education demand. They do not reveal future trends in higher education. Because student behavior on Studyportals is forward-looking, this can give us insights into what the future holds.

Our latest internal report shows Studyportals pageviews data is highly correlated with HESA enrolment data. This paper found a 0.921 rank correlation with the country level and a 0.836 rank correlation with the institution level. These results are in line with past findings.

Another internal report shows Studyportals pageviews data is highly correlated with US enrolment data. These results are also in line with past findings.

Hence, if page views are relatively high for a given year, clients can expect higher commencements and enrolments the following year. Studyportals is able to track the enrolments of the future, in real-time.

“I really appreciate the detailed analytics platform Studyportals provides, which I can log into anytime and can get a clear sense of which programs are attracting the most attention. This kind of real-time data not only lets me measure the return on my annual investment in the platform, but also understand broader trends in prospective student demand!”  Laura Montgomery, Senior Director, College and Enrollment Marketing, The New School 

Studyportals’ insights are based on real-time student interest data, collected on our portals and measured as pageviews. It is representative of a global audience of tens of millions of prospective international students looking for English-taught programs. This also means that our data can show the rising or falling popularity of different disciplines and subjects and of study destination countries. Even more importantly, it can show the spikes in student interest that point to rising enrolments from different countries.

 

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