Higher Education Product Update: Tuition Data, Transfer Programs, and More

At Emsi, we’re always looking for more ways to deliver reliable, relevant data that helps you solve problems, serve students, and improve your institution. It’s why we regularly update our tools and services with new data and functionality. Here’s a look at a few of the recent changes we’ve made to serve you better.

Labor market analytics (Analyst)

Many of the colleges and universities we work with use our labor market analytics tool, Analyst, to develop new programs, enhance existing programs, understand their competitive landscape, and proactively engage with employers. To help with this work, here are two important updates.

1) Compare institutional cost of attendance

Assessing the competitive landscape is a crucial step in determining the viability of new academic programs. To help you see how your institution compares to peers in terms of cost, we’ve now added IPEDS data on tuition, room and board, and other student charges.

You can find this new cost data in the Institutional Completions Table, where you can view it right alongside detailed breakdowns of each institution’s number of completions, market share, and year-over-year growth. Note that tuition data is available at the institution level only and is therefore not program specific.

You can use this tuition data to supplement information about program completions and better evaluate which institutions are truly competitors. For example, if you offer an information technology program but your institution’s tuition is $20,000/yr less than your closest peer, then you’ve uncovered a valuable opportunity to differentiate. This can inform your messaging and the kinds of students you target in recruitment and marketing campaigns.

2) Identify emerging job posting trends

The Job Postings Table now includes a percent change column, making it even easier to track posting activity across time and identify jobs with growing demand. To use it, just select your region, choose your time frame, and go. Sort by the percent change column to see job titles, occupations, or companies in your region that are ramping up (or slowing down) their posting activity.

Many colleges and universities ask us about the best way to identify emerging job categories. This is a simple first step that will allow you to see areas of growth and where businesses might be changing or evolving. With this insight, you can get ahead of the curve by re-evaluating your program offerings (and how well they address these growth areas) and by having more proactive conversations with employers about the positions they are trying to fill.

Please feel free to ask your account manager or contact us for additional training or assistance with these features. We’d love to help you find the best way to start using them in your workflow!

Career Coach

Career Coach is a personalized student-facing career exploration site that helps colleges and universities better communicate career outcomes to students. Here’s two recent updates to help you do even more to serve your students with Career Coach.

1) Show students transfer opportunities

For many institutions, transfer programs make up an important part of their academic portfolio and provide students a crucial on-ramp for their journey to a four-year degree. But helping students choose the right program requires providing them with the relevant data, including eligible programs at partner institutions and career opportunities related to those programs.

To help with this, Career Coach now gives your institution the option to add transfer information at the bottom of each program page—enabling students to see how your programs can get them started on the path to achieving their career goals.

This provides an effective way for community colleges to show students the value and relevance of a two-year degree. For example, imagine a prospective student is using Career Coach to explore careers related to your institution’s associate’s in engineering technology program. They may find the top entry-level education for her target career is a bachelor’s degree. By displaying available transfer opportunities for that program on the same page as related careers, you can give them the confidence they need to enroll and show them the connection between your institution and their long-term goals.

2) Add relevant career data to your program pages

We’re also pleased to announce that the popular Career Coach plugin is now available for our Canada and UK clients! The plugin allows you to display relevant, program-specific career data, like related occupations and typical wages, directly on your academic program pages—providing valuable insight for students and driving traffic to your institution’s full Career Coach site.

GoRecruit

GoRecruit is Emsi’s new tool for enrollment management teams. It provides key alumni employment information (including top employers and job titles) in configurable infographics that are easy to download and share. 

View alumni sample size in GoRecruit

We recently added profile sample size to the GoRecruit interface, so you can better interpret the counts and percentages on each infographic. The count dynamically updates based on the filters you apply, making it easy to see, at a glance, how many alumni profiles are included in a given cohort.

For instance, suppose you’re gearing up for a College of Business open house and want to add a few data points about alumni success to your prospective student presentation. Simply add the relevant degree level and academic unit filters, and see the updated profile count above the infographics. You’re ready to understand and share the data with confidence, knowing you have a strong sample size of 1,885 past students!

If you’d like to learn more about how Emsi data can work for your institution, explore solutions for higher education or send us a note. We’d love to learn more about the work you do, and discuss how our data can help.

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