Ian Slater ends each day with the same nagging concern. With hundreds of students to monitor simultaneously and a staff that’s stretched thin across many responsibilities, students can fall between the cracks. “I carry a constant assumption that there’s a student out there who needs help,” says Slater, the Vice President for Student Development at Eastern Nazarene College (ENC) in Massachusetts. “I know some of them are struggling terribly, and I know some won’t be able to come back next year.”
The problem is familiar for higher education institutions in the U.S. as they focus on retaining students in a climate of declining enrollment and managing workloads among the recent high departure rates for faculty and staff. Without an effective mechanism to sift through student data and identify issues before they take root, faculty and staff are often unable to provide the support structure needed to ensure students stay the course. “To identify and engage every student who needs help, our advisors and support teams either need to have a smaller caseload or some sort of technology to help prioritize the need,” Slater says.
Faced with these challenges, Eastern Nazarene College is pursuing institution-wide change by shifting to a
student-first, data-driven model that will generate insights, streamline information, and promote operational efficiencies, leading to less staff burnout and fewer students dropping out.
Like many institutions, ENC has seen a period of upheaval in recent years and experienced substantial staff turnover following the pandemic. With soaring costs of living and challenging economic conditions, higher education has struggled to keep pace with compensation, and many education professionals have moved to the private sector, leaving those who have stayed with a mounting workload and few resources to manage it.
Last year, an article circulated among education professionals, describing this phenomenon. “I keep trying to wrap my head around how many people are eagerly fleeing my former professional field, a field so many of us once believed to be the perfect profession,” the author, Megan Krone, wrote. Those leaving were dedicated educators, people Krone referred to as “lifers.” Krone calls out “the deep-seated, structural
problems” that have chased many away from the field they previously loved.
But there are other problems too. An increasing narrative of critique for higher education in the U.S. is taking hold as some business leaders undermine the value of a college degree. This mentality is chipping away at enrollment figures, which in turn affects the budget, impacting the extent to which institutions can implement their mission. This is compounded by negative media surrounding the rising cost of higher education and the lasting impact of the pandemic on the industry. As Krone writes: “We see so much turnover, at the very bottom and the very top of the hierarchy. Both are expensive and a toll on those who stay.”
The pressure was keenly felt at ENC, a small college where many members of the faculty and staff juggle multiple roles. “Our faculty and staff care deeply about students and work hard for their success. Without a system to coordinate our efforts, however, students could slip through their net of support,” Slater says.
“From an operational perspective, watermark is undoubtedly a best practice when it comes to the student success and retention rate. It helps us keep the students we’ve worked so hard to recruit and see them across the finish line which in turn improves the bottom line of the college.”
— Ian Slater, Vice President for Student Development at Eastern Nazarene College (ENC) in Massachusetts
Although ENC’s retention rate is at 75%, Slater’s attention is on identifying the remaining 25%, stepping in long before students decide to leave. “It’s tragic that some students start their educational journeys but don’t continue at the college; we owe it to them to help each one achieve their educational goals, as well as experience our transformative mission,” Slater says.
All of these outcomes can be tackled through the new software suite the ENC leadership team has introduced to transform the way staff interact with students at the college and improve their prospects for success. Back in 2018, Slater helped bring the Watermark Student Success & Engagement (formerly Aviso Enterprise) platform to another campus, which later contributed to a retention gain of 5 percentage points in three years and a top 10 ranking for student engagement nationally. Confident in the power of data to drive the right interventions at the right time, Slater knew it would be the ideal tool to boost ENC’s student success rates — particularly by creating a supportive environment in which students, faculty, staff, and the college could cooperate effectively.
“Our mission is anchored in the idea of providing a transformational education for our students. Students who don’t receive the right support at the right time often can’t stay enrolled. Student departure isn’t just an enrollment problem; it’s the incomplete fulfillment of our mission in the life of a human being. Helping students succeed is about giving them a transformative educational experience. When this happens, students will then be ready to transform the world around them,” Slater says.
Watermark’s platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline data and generate insights that build enrollment and improve student performance. That data is then actionable, based on a holistic view of the student, including analyzing their performance in near real time, and tracking their progress. “It’s a dynamic way for institutional members to understand what’s happening with their students so they can intervene before students lose momentum or leave altogether,” says Kristi Wellington-Baker, U.S. Higher Education Strategy Lead at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which hosts Watermark’s platform.
“It enables institutions of higher education to focus their resources and address workforce capacity at the same time by augmenting critical human resources with technical support,” says Wellington-Baker. This is aligned with the student-facing piece of the retention tool which, “allows the college to focus their time on those who need it, when they need it, because they have this dynamic progression of student experience information at their fingertips.”
Replacing a cumbersome system of emails and excel spreadsheets, faculty and staff at ENC can now look up their students in a database, generating alerts when they show signs of struggling, whether it’s a drop in grades, declining attendance, or withdrawing from college social life. “At a small college with limited resources and a lot of people wearing multiple hats, Watermark Student Success & Engagement is going to tell us which students need support when and help us fulfill our values in a consistent and impactful way,” Slater says.
“Watermark student success & engagement is a dynamic way for institutional members to understand what’s happening with their students so they can intervene before students lose momentum or leave altogether.”
— Kristi Wellington-Baker, U.S. Higher Education Strategy Lead at Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Watermark’s Student Success & Engagement platform presents a compelling opportunity to increase the success potential for students at ENC. Slater did his research, comparing competitor products in the marketplace and weighing up the advantages compared to the cost. “Watermark is a best-in-class-product, its user experience comes out on top,” he says, pointing to the host of features it harnesses to achieve results, including predictive analytics.
Beyond the direct benefits of the platform’s technical functionality, however, Slater sees an even more important benefit to ENC. The platform presents an opportunity to transform the engagement fabric of the college, awakening the whole campus community to its potential to support student success and creating an environment that enables every student to achieve their potential. “I’ve worked with this product and seen its impact on a community,” he says. “This is one of the single most important levers an institution can activate to improve their student success levels.”
Following the initial transition to Watermark’s Student Success & Engagement, it was easy to get other members of staff on board, and after implementation, the college is abuzz with the promise of progress. “There’s a lot of energy and excitement that we get to be part of this elite system. Colleges can get down on themselves in difficult times and think too small. An opportunity to get this world-class system is really uplifting,” Slater says.
He has a clear trajectory for results with expectations of a 7% increase in retention within three years of implementation. In the immediate term, ENC will start to see improvements in the engagement and success of students benefiting from the enhanced support structure that’s now in place. The uptick in engagement will lead to improvements in GPA, helping students gain confidence in their academic abilities, all of which leads to increased retention downstream and, over time, more students making it to graduation and leaving college with a degree.
“I’ll be able to trust that there aren’t students falling through the cracks and that we are being faithful with the futures that they have entrusted to us,” Slater says. Instead of worrying about students leaving college saddled with debt and no degree, “We have a resource that allows us to fulfill our promises and help more of our students in the long term.”
This is the drive that motivates Slater, who signs his emails ‘Cheering for you’ to reinforce his belief in student potential. Having worked as an advisor, he’s familiar with the frustration that faces his team as they struggle to keep track of every student in their care. Now, they can simply log in to the Watermark system and monitor student progress in whatever format they wish, searching via relevant tags to check in on the men’s basketball team, freshman study groups, or female history majors, for example.
“It’s a really important and affordable solution for institutions of higher education to be able to track, manage and analyze what’s happening with students, which they can then draw meaning from to inform their practice and policies,” says Wellington-Baker.
It works in harmony with offline interactions, too. A member of staff might run into a stressed-out student in the hallway and discover they face financial challenges that prevent them from returning next semester. A note can be entered into the system, an alert sent, and a response coordinated, ensuring an action plan is created and maintained with the relevant resources to provide the best possible support.
“Every member of this campus community has an influence on a student’s decision to return each semester, as well as in their ability to be successful. This system weaves together that support network through a data infrastructure, which allows us to be a cohesive support team rather than a key individual here and there making their best efforts,” Slater says. “This will help our faculty and staff be more supportive of students without making a big dent in their time.”
The benefits of the increased retention rate ripple through every level, boosting the budget of the college at a time when higher education is feeling the financial strain. “From an operational perspective, Watermark is undoubtedly a best practice when it comes to the student success and retention rate…it helps us keep the students we’ve worked so hard to recruit and see them across the finish line, which in turn improves the bottom line of the college,” Slater says.
Motivated by a strong desire to enable student success, Alex Leader, the individual behind Watermark’s student retention software, devised a system that would help students achieve their education goals. As a high school student in rural Ohio, Leader had performed well, passing his tests with flying colors and securing a place to study pre-med at a university. But he never really learned how to study. “I just memorized the material. When I went to college, I quickly realized that I didn’t know how best to learn.”
When his grades fell, he didn’t know where to find help, so he switched majors from pre-med to computer science, where he was shown all of the resources available to offer students support. “I was introduced to the mentoring program and tutoring services – I’m sure I was shown these earlier, but I didn’t associate myself as someone facing a potential challenge.” After graduating from college, he spent eight years as a consultant building his understanding of product engineering in the business world, but he never forgot the period that redefined his career.
“I always wanted to give back to that version of me and the amount of struggle I went through.” So, in 2010, he partnered with a small college in Ohio and built a program that emailed advisors when students didn’t register for classes they were supposed to enroll in. “That was the first inclination that I could use my skills around software development to really impact students’ lives,” he says.
Two years later he launched Aviso, scaling in 2016 before merging with Watermark in January 2022 to roll out Watermark Student Success & Engagement, which is now used by colleges across the U.S. Among these are colleges in Ohio, where Leader’s work is now impacting the children of high school peers he graduated alongside. “We’re creating social mobility and improving lives. That’s the burning fire that keeps me going,” says Leader, who is now Chief Impact Officer at Watermark.
The Watermark suite is made up of seven different products across institutional effectiveness as well as student success and retention. Historically, these factors have been treated as separate entities by higher education but the team at Watermark believes they have to overlap. “They can be symbiotic in offering insights into each other, driving better outcomes,” Leader explains.
One example is Watermark Course Evaluations & Surveys, typically seen as part of course and instructor feedback discussions, but also of value from a student success and engagement perspective so that outreach can happen earlier on a given course. Similarly, identifying a student’s individual needs early on can be used to inform the advisors and mentors they are assigned, ensuring they are paired with an extended support team who can alleviate any challenges along their academic journey.
The benefits of Watermark’s symbiotic approach come together in an overarching Insights Hub, which compiles connections from data accumulated across the platform and enables leaders to see whether their institutional strategy is proving successful, or whether they should pivot efforts towards other initiatives. “That’s what we’re really excited about as a company,” Leader says. “We’re bringing together the core of what higher education is and how it operates between institutional effectiveness and student success. Under the umbrella of the Insights Hub, we can help institutions answer really important strategic questions.”
“We’re bringing together the core of what higher education is and how it operates between institutional effectiveness and student success. Under the umbrella of the insights hub, we can help institutions answer really important strategic questions.”
— Alex Leader, Chief Impact Officer at Watermark
A key consideration for the team is cost, particularly at a time when many colleges are struggling to balance their budget requirements and losing students in the process. “Our goal is to ensure that every institution has the capability to use these solutions,” Leader explains, pointing to more expensive competitors that eliminate a subset of institutions who simply can’t afford their platforms.
“Our belief at Watermark is that pricing should scale, and we should be able to create equitable scenarios for every institution.” This means adapting the platform to suit specific institutional needs, a flexibility that’s built in from the start to provide a system that evolves with each institution. Student Success & Engagement has a set of foundational components, and the Watermark team configures the platform in a way that matches the current and future requirements of the institution. “It grows with an institution so that as the college gets more mature, the platform can fully support them in relation to their student success strategies,” Leader says.
It takes only three to six months to implement the platform and the Watermark team is on hand to advise throughout. The process is collaborative. “To ensure successful implementations, our team partners with an institution through strategy discussions, mapping desired outcomes to how the platform is configured, and training users to be catalysts for student success across the college,” Leader continues. As a result, Watermark survey responses show a consistently high satisfaction rate, with every score between 4.8 and 5 out of 5 last quarter.
Once the system is in place, periodic catchups allow for follow-up sessions with insights drawn from across Watermark’s 1,700 partner institutions. This also feeds into Watermark’s growing body of research, which is a key focus for the company moving forward. “There are so many data silos in higher education…we want to break those down and eventually publish any findings to make sure others can take advantage of this research,” Leader says.
Watermark has partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to carry out one such initiative, learning how two-year colleges can improve the experience a prospect has from first contact to eventual enrollment. “For a prospective student, not only is the first interaction with the college so important, but every interaction downstream must build upon the prior in a natural and supportive way, regardless of who offers that service at the institution,” Leader adds.
Watermark’s ongoing evolution is underpinned by its partnership with AWS, which provides the tools and technical infrastructure to support rapid growth as they scale to meet the needs of higher education institutions across the country. “We understand what’s happening with Watermark in the broader marketplace and how it’s meeting institutional needs,” says Wellington-Baker. “Pulling together meaningful data in both the student assessment and operational efficiency lanes in a way they can leverage is important and brilliant.”
It was after her first year that Ruth Aguilar ran into financial difficulties, making her question whether she could continue at Eastern Nazarene College. Like other international students in the U.S., she didn’t qualify for loans and had to pay her balance after each semester. It was a worrying time. She was enjoying college and didn’t want to leave. “ENC had welcomed me with open arms,” Aguilar says.
On the advice of her Resident Director, she applied to be a Resident Assistant, helping to coordinate activities and university student services. That support was crucial in her decision to stay, despite the financial challenges she faced. “They worked with me and trusted my pay plan… I knew that I was not going to get this same experience anywhere else. That is why I decided to stay.”
With the support of the Director of Community Life, Aguilar ran for student body president, serving two consecutive terms and securing a degree in Business Administration and Finance before returning as an employee of the college. Her experience reinforced the value of an effective support network, and she is excited by the prospect of a new system that will make this vital aspect of the student experience more targeted and efficient.
“This new system will improve the student experience in so many ways. Smooth and clear communication between ENC administration and the student body is something that has been needed,” Aguilar says. “It will improve the efficiency of academic life as well. With the various factors that students have to think about in college, including financial issues, class schedules, and non-academic support all addressed in one place, it will relieve some of their stress by providing a better structure to address student needs.”
Most students plan on completing their degree in four years, but only about 47% do so, according to The National Center for Education Statistics. For the 80% of all undergraduate students in the country that change their majors at least once before earning a degree, it can take even longer, adding to the burden of debt they accumulate before entering the job market.
This is where Watermark’s capacity to identify problems early on – even before they arise – makes a real impact. “If we do a lot of the work up front to align the student with the right curriculum, it shortens this timeframe considerably so that they can get their degree and get into the workforce,” Leader says.
It’s this scope to be proactive rather than reactive that will allow ENC to fulfill its promise to students and step in before a challenge presents itself, “because frankly, if they face it in real time, it might already be too late,” Leader adds. He knows what it feels like to face unexpected hurdles in higher education; that’s why the Watermark team spent the pandemic enhancing the software’s online modality so that students can access resources remotely.
“We made sure that all those resources were not only available to students, but that they were aware they existed, because that was the problem with my story,” Leader says, “and so much of this is about making sure students know where they can turn to for help.”
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