Starfish
Early alert system using data analytics to improve student retention.
What it does
Overview
Who it's for
Best suited for
- Identifying first-generation or underprepared students who need targeted academic support.
- Flagging students with attendance or engagement issues before performance declines significantly.
- Coordinating early intervention efforts across academic advising, tutoring, financial aid, and counseling teams.
- Measuring and improving institutional retention rates through data-informed strategic planning.
Key features
What you get
- Aggregates student data from multiple campus systems to surface early warning signals about academic and behavioral risk.
- Enables advisors and faculty to track interventions and document student support interactions within a unified dashboard.
- Provides predictive analytics that identify at-risk students before they withdraw or fail courses.
- Generates institutional reports and analytics to measure intervention effectiveness and inform retention strategy refinement.
Pros & cons
The honest take
What works well
- Integrates data from multiple campus systems into a single, actionable view of student risk.
- Enables proactive intervention before students disengage, improving retention outcomes.
- Provides clear documentation of support efforts, helping institutions track intervention impact.
- Designed specifically for higher education contexts, reflecting the complexity of student success factors.
- Helps institutions shift from reactive crisis intervention to strategic, data-driven support.
Worth knowing
- Pricing is custom and typically expensive, making adoption difficult for smaller institutions with limited budgets.
- Effectiveness depends heavily on data quality and completeness across integrated campus systems.
- Requires significant institutional change management and staff training to implement successfully.
- Predictive models may reflect historical biases in campus data, potentially disadvantaging certain student populations.
Pricing
What it costs
Starfish uses custom institutional pricing based on enrollment size and scope. Contact EAB for a tailored quote.
Fully configured solution with integration, training, and ongoing support for higher education institutions.
Best use cases
When to reach for it
Proactive At-Risk Student Identification
Use Starfish to systematically flag students showing early warning signals—missed classes, declining grades, financial holds—before they withdraw. Advisors and support teams receive alerts enabling them to reach out with targeted help, significantly improving the likelihood of re-engagement.
Coordinated Multi-Team Interventions
Bring together academic advisors, instructors, counselors, and financial aid staff on a unified platform to coordinate interventions for the same student. This eliminates siloed efforts and ensures consistent, holistic support addressing academic, personal, and financial barriers simultaneously.
Measuring and Optimizing Retention Strategy
Track all student support interactions and outcomes within Starfish to build an institutional record of what interventions work best for different populations. Use these analytics to refine retention strategy, allocate resources to highest-impact programs, and demonstrate accountability to leadership.
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