Education · AWS

University system identifies at-risk students 22% sooner with a Student 360

22% earlier at-risk identification · 6 months from vision to production

ClientUS state university system, 9 campuses, 180,000 students
Duration6 months
Industry Education →

At a glance

Key metrics

22%
improvement in at-risk student identification
6 months
from vision to production
30+
institutions using the shared accelerator

Challenge

The situation

Student data lived in SIS, LMS, advising, and residential-life systems. Early-alert flags fired too late — often after the student had already disengaged. Advisors didn't trust the dashboards.

Approach

How we delivered

  1. 01 Deployed the Apptad Student 360 accelerator on AWS, pre-configured for common SIS/LMS sources.
  2. 02 Worked with advisors to define an early-warning signal they could act on, not just a score.
  3. 03 Integrated outreach workflows into the advisor's day-to-day tool so insight to action took seconds.

Architecture

Solution architecture

AWS Lake Formation governs the student data lake. Glue jobs ingest SIS (Banner), LMS (Canvas), advising, and residential-life data. Amazon SageMaker trains the early-warning model. Results surfaced via QuickSight + pushed to Salesforce Education Cloud for advisor outreach.

Architecture diagram placeholder Data flow across source systems, platform, governance, and activation layers.

Outcomes

Measured results

  • 22% improvement in correctly identifying at-risk students within the first 6 weeks of the term.
  • Advisor NPS on the early-warning tool rose from 31 to 72.
  • Accelerator now deployed at 30+ institutions with partial federal/state match funding.

Technology

Tech stack

Platform

  • AWS Lake Formation
  • AWS Glue
  • Amazon S3
  • Amazon SageMaker

Analytics & CRM

  • Amazon QuickSight
  • Salesforce Education Cloud

Apptad IP

  • Student 360 accelerator

“Our advisors now get a signal they believe in — and the time to act on it.”

— Associate Provost for Student Success

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