Learning from higher education: How Ivy Tech is using predictive analytics and data democracy to reverse decades of entrenched practices

As the largest community college in the US, Ivy Tech ingests over 100M rows of data a day. Brendan Aldrich and Lige Hensley explain how Ivy Tech is applying predictive technologies to establish a true data democracya self-service data analytics environment empowering thousands of users each day to improve operations, achieve strategic goals, and support student success.

Ivy Tech Community College is the largest singly accredited community college in North America, with about 175,000 students registered for classes each year at 32 campuses and 80 satellite locations. As Indiana’s statewide community college, Ivy Tech manages 23 million transmitted emails and 10 TB of information downloaded from the internet and generates over 100 million rows of data each day across its primary data systems. These large datasets created a major problem for the college due to disparate data sources and inflexible tools. Employees, faculty, and students weren’t able to access all of the data needed to perform their roles effectively, and some users were even logging into 20 different applications per day to get a piecemeal view of critical information. This inefficient workflow and disorganization meant that the quality and accuracy of Ivy Tech’s data was in question. Brendan Aldrich and Lige Hensley decided to face this challenge head-on by building a true data democracy—a self-service data analytics environment that went way beyond just providing access. They created an intuitive, relevant, and interactive unified system that could help answer evolving questions in seconds without end users having to engage with IT or a dedicated analytics team. Brendan and Lige share the technical details on how they implemented various technologies, including Pentaho, Amazon, and Python, to improve operational efficiency, improve key aspects of student life (i.e., predict at over 80% accuracy which students will fail before they do and implement early intervention in the classroom), and even capture over $5 million in additional performance funding during a single term.