Simmons &
Simmons
Group, LLC
Trends Analysis
Students' lives are transformed by their time at your Institution. During those years, your Institution can be transformed by any number of impacts.
What will your Institution look like when she is ready to graduate?
Long term success requires a clear understanding of what drives enrollment and retention throughout your institution's market and within your institution. The 4-SIGHT Financial Model is a unique model that utilizes Big Data and mobilizes Interactive Visualizations to harness uniquely holistic and institution-specific enrollment and retention trends that drive competitiveness and ensure sustainability .
Big Data and
Interactive Visualization
4-SIGHT is a novel predictive model that offers Higher Education leadership institution-specific trends in student enrollment and cohort retention. This, in turn, enables key decision-makers to develop and convey optimal enrollment strategies and maximize retention and matriculation rates. Our model enables develop long-term solutions for long-term success.
The 4-SIGHT leverages the power of big data analytics to identify long-term trends in recruitment and retention and the revenue and expenses that accompany the enrollment and financial management processes. To produce the most accurate trend projections, 4-SIGHT utilizes a highly focused and select set of variables that include unique institutional data and well-researched and evidenced-based market factors proven to be highly accurate and reliable in projecting long-term enrollment and retention trends.
One of the exceptional features of 4-SIGHT is its interactive user interface design and Sensitivity Analysis capacities. Users can identify and change individual or sets of input variables such as enrollment projections and retention rate, and immediately see the impact on total enrollment and revenue trends. By running multiple scenarios and changing discrete variables, the 4-SIGHT produces robust and streamlined projections. Given the rapidly changing and non-linear nature of some key enrollment variables, this adaptive function is critical to achieving actionable and implementable insights.
A final distinctive trademark of 4-SIGHT is its emphasis on visualization. College and university senior leadership are often expected to convey key enrollment and financial metrics data to board members, accreditors, and other key stakeholders. The model produces an array of clear and customizable enrollment and financial metrics graphics that facilitate strategic planning. Refer to example below.
trends analysis
The 4-SIGHT Financial Model leverages the power of big data analytics and higher education research to produce customized five-year enrollment and budget projections for small to medium-sized colleges and universities. To produce robust and institution-specific projections, 4-SIGHT combines a set of key institutional variables with well-researched, evidenced-based formulas proven to be highly reliable in projecting revenue and expenses from student population data.
Most small private institutions are tuition-dependent, so 4-SIGHT begins with a robust enrollment model that accurately tracks the retention and graduation rate of each student cohort for six years. This cohort-based approach means that 4-SIGHT revenue projections are closely tied to retention and student success - as they should be. An advantage of utilizing this relationship is that institution leaders can quantify the budgetary impact of increased retention.
The key feature that sets the 4-SIGHT Model apart is its interactive user interface that allows an institution's executive and financial leadership and strategic planners to change input variables, such as discount rate or retention rate, and immediately see the impact on total enrollment and revenue projections. To ensure that decision-makers are able to accurately project enrollment and retention trends and the accompanying finances, 4-SIGHT enables users to adapt model inputs based on changing enrollment and market climates by:
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running best-case and worst-case scenarios using a variety of well-researched variables
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selecting the variables or processes that have the largest influence on the budget (sensitivity analysis)
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estimating the payback time for a strategic initiative
A final distinctive trademark of the 4-SIGHT Financial Model is its emphasis on visualization. College and university senior leadership are often expected to convey key enrollment and financial metrics data to board members, accreditors, and other stakeholders. The model produces an array of clear and customizable enrollment and financial graphics that facilitate strategic planning. Refer to example below.
We recognize the budget and staffing constraints at small to medium-sized institutions, so we purposefully designed a model with low data requirements. All of the data needed to customize the model are variables that are commonly collected and reported. There is no new software platform to install or integrate and the price of the model is extremely competitive.
