FutureBright Analytics: How an international education company uses analytics to power growth and student success at scale

Assessing risk using machine learning to hedge effectively

Presented by Brian Meagher, Vice President, Analytics, Shorelight Education

Shorelight brings together universities and international students with the goal to help educate the world. In just five short years, Shorelight has grown to enroll more than 10,000 students from 120 countries, all while maintaining a first year completion rate of 90%.

There are 1.1 million international students studying in America today, but many of them cannot visit these universities before choosing where they decide to go. Since it’s such a large purchase decision, Shorelight deals with both sides of this problem: They help advertise their university partners to all the students across the globe and help educate the students about the universities to make an informed decision (leading to a higher conversion rate).

The Problem? Even with all this help, there is a chance that the student’s visa request gets rejected. Since this would be a massive loss for Shorelight, they need to build out a model to see what kind of students are at most risk for rejection and help strengthen their profiles.

The Solution? Shorelight used RapidMiner to create a workflow, automate the series of questions traditionally asked by the visa guides, and create a risk profile. Through this, they were able to drive $1.5 million in income to these universities. This all leads to a greater increase in operational predictability and growth in total profitable customers.

Watch the full video below to learn how Shorelight uses data science to help fuel growth and student success, particularly how to convert the right students to the right universities.