Xavier University
Enabling Proactive Student Success Through Predictive Insights
The Challenge
Like many higher education institutions, Xavier University is deeply committed to supporting student success and improving retention and graduation outcomes. However, gaining timely insight into which students might benefit from additional support can be difficult when data lives across multiple systems and reports.
Prior to this initiative, student success teams relied on manual reporting processes and fragmented data sources to understand student engagement and progress. This created several challenges:
- Advisors had limited visibility into emerging student challenges across academic, financial, and engagement indicators.
- Faculty and staff often had to piece together information from multiple systems to understand a student’s full experience.
- Institutional leaders lacked a unified, real-time view of trends affecting student persistence.
- Evaluating the impact of outreach and support programs required significant manual analysis.
Xavier recognized an opportunity to modernize its data environment and create a more proactive approach to student support—one that would help advisors spend more time working directly with students and less time searching for information.
To begin this effort, Xavier partnered with Avaap’s Data, Analytics, and AI team to define a shared vision for data-driven student success. Over the course of two months, the joint team conducted:
- A current-state assessment of data and reporting practices
- More than 40 stakeholder interviews across eight departments
- Documentation of institutional priorities and student success goals
- Alignment on a long-term analytics strategy
This foundational work ensured that the resulting solution would address immediate retention needs while creating a scalable platform for future innovation.
Key Highlights
Working together, Avaap helped Xavier modernize its data environment to support a proactive student success strategy, implemented alongside the university’s Workday rollout. The solution leverages Snowflake as a centralized data platform, supporting a custom Undergraduate Student Persistence analytics and dashboard experience.
The solution combines advanced analytics with intuitive dashboards to provide clear, actionable insight for student success teams and university leadership.
As Sheri Thomas, CIO of Xavier University, noted:
“By modernizing our data in parallel with our Workday implementation, Xavier was able to accelerate our student success strategy. Using Snowflake to unify Workday data with other critical sources enabled our first student persistence analytics capabilities, delivering immediate value and empowering leaders to support students proactively.”
Supporting Advisors with Timely Insight
The platform brings together an analytics layer that evaluates patterns across multiple student success indicators, including:
- Academic performance
- Financial indicators
- Student engagement signals
- Enrollment and progression patterns
These insights help advisors quickly understand when a student may benefit from additional outreach or resources.
Rather than relying on static reports, the system updates information, allowing student success teams to see emerging trends and act quickly.
Advisor Dashboard
The advisor dashboard provides a practical, student-focused interface that allows teams to:
- Quickly identify students who may benefit from additional support
- Search for individual students by ID
- Filter by major, cohort, financial indicators, or engagement patterns
- View enrollment patterns and term-to-term progress
This visibility allows advisors to spend more time engaging with students and less time compiling information from multiple systems.
Leadership Insights
In addition to supporting timely student interventions, the platform provides a strategic view for university leadership.
The executive dashboard allows leaders to:
- Monitor persistence and enrollment trends across cohorts
- Identify patterns across academic, financial, and engagement indicators
- Understand how student success initiatives are performing over time
- Inform strategic planning and institutional investment decisions
These insights help Xavier align resources and programs with areas that will have the greatest impact on student success.
A Modern Data Foundation
Behind the dashboard is a scalable analytics architecture designed to support long-term institutional growth.
The solution includes:
- Snowflake as the university’s unified cloud data platform
- Alteryx to automate data preparation and eliminate manual reporting processes
- Tableau dashboards for intuitive, interactive visualization
- A Student 360 data model bringing together data from across the institution
- Expanding Workday integrations to strengthen the connection between operational systems and analytics
This modern data environment ensures that information is accurate, consistent, and available when it is needed.
Xavier now has a powerful analytics platform that enables earlier engagement with students and more informed institutional decision-making.
Key outcomes include:
- Earlier Student Support: University staff can identify opportunities to connect with students sooner, helping address challenges before they become barriers to success.
- More Effective Advisor Time: With unified insights readily available, advisors spend less time searching for data and more time working directly with students.
- Institution-Wide Visibility: Xavier is laying the groundwork for institution‑wide visibility into persistence trends through improved analytics and reporting.
- Reduced Manual Reporting: Automated data pipelines have significantly reduced the manual effort previously required to produce reports.
- A Foundation for Future Innovation: The new analytics environment positions Xavier to expand data-driven insights across admissions, student success programs, and institutional planning.
Looking Ahead
The Undergraduate Student Persistence Analytics platform represents the first step in a broader vision for data-enabled decision-making at Xavier.
The university and Avaap have already identified several additional opportunities to expand the platform, including:
- Evaluating the effectiveness of student support initiatives
- Expanding insights for admissions and enrollment teams
- Supporting academic departments with program-level analytics
- Continuing to integrate new data sources through Workday and Snowflake
Together, these efforts are helping Xavier create a more connected, proactive student success ecosystem.
With modern data infrastructure and a clear focus on supporting students, Xavier is building a foundation that will continue to strengthen retention, improve student outcomes, and empower advisors for years to come.
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