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ATLANTA—On a blistering hot June day, Georgia State University incoming freshman Jaila Heathman found herself feted inside the football stadium by cheerleaders, football coach Shawn Elliott, grilled chicken sandwiches and the booming sound of “Uptown Funk.” The academic year wouldn't start for two months, and Heathman wasn't a handpicked athletic recruit or an academic star. In fact, she was someone who Georgia State's computer system decided was just a bit underprepared for college.
Heathman had been invited to the stadium party by an algorithm. For the past seven years, Georgia State has been feeding student data into a “Moneyball”-style predictive analytics system, a custom piece of software designed to figure out who is ready to succeed in college, and how to keep them enrolled. By crunching numbers such as the student's grades in critical classes like 10th-grade English, Georgia State identified Heathman as among the university's weaker incoming freshmen, meaning she's at risk of joining the 31 million Americans who started college and never finished. The stadium event was a highlight of its Summer Success Academy, a pre-college academic prep program that coaches participants selected by the system on skills like managing time, reading textbooks and talking to professors.
“I feel like that shows how much effort they are willing to put into their students,” Heathman said. “A lot of schools, and even professors, they'll just let you fail and not even care because you're paying for the class.”
Georgia State's leaders turned to predictive analytics to fix a long, perplexing problem in higher education: The 4 out of 10 students who start college and don't finish in at least six years—some never.
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