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ROI has become a real decision making criterion for students considering higher education options.
Pragya
Oct 18, 2022
ROI has become a real decision making criterion for students considering higher education options. There is increased transparency in college costs and job placement rates as well as tools for basic career exploration. However, higher-ed institutions are still struggling to articulate connections between their programs and career outcomes to ROI conscious prospects.
Pragya has been working with a number of higher-ed institutions, including liberal arts colleges, HBCUs and community colleges to help them identify and capture best-fit student leads, unlock insights into prospect interests and drive enrollment yield. The end to end approach of connecting leads to prospect engagement to retention with a common thread of career relevance is the best solution for higher ed institutions to maximize not just enrollment, but the lifetime value of a student.
As we spent time talking to universities about problems they were trying to address, it was apparent that several of them were looking to enrich their websites with labor market information. A few institutions have already done that by investing in custom web development of labor market visualization, often licensing labor data APIs from Emsi Burning Glass.. However, it requires significant up front investment in web development and labor market API integration to build out a UI to present career outlook information to learners. For most higher-ed institutions, this is an investment they cannot afford.
As part of our work building our higher-ed and workforce solutions, Pragya pulls data from the Department of Labor as well as our partner Burning Glass. While labor market intelligence companies like Emsi-Burning Glass invest in a deeper analysis of employer/job data, the Department of Labor data (BLS/O-Net) is public information available to anyone.
The pandemic has wreaked havoc over the past 18 months and the education sector has not been spared. Pragya wanted to do our small part in giving back to the community. We built out a web widget that pulls data from CareerOneStop (BLS/O-Net), which any university can deploy on their websites to showcase ROI of their programs to prospective students – at zero cost. Higher-Ed institutions can download their own free widget directly from Pragya, customized to their programs and deploy it on their websites in a matter of minutes. Pragya offers two versions of the free widget – a per-program widget that can go on individual program pages, as well as a universal widget where learners can explore the career outlook of any of the college’s programs in one place.
We wrote about Pragya’s philosophy and approach of using career relevance as the central vehicle to help universities improve their enrollment in this article. While Pragya believes that personalized engagement and insights on prospects is necessary to make a real difference in enrollment, a first step in that direction is providing basic career outlook information to prospective students. Now colleges are empowered to take this important first step in putting career relevance at the center of student decision making.