Leveraging data to simplify processes, enhance schedules, and improve efficiency

Data provided by Ad Astra offered Mesa Community College insight into student behavior and highlighted the many ways better scheduling methods could help its students get “in, through, and out,” Stroops said.

Implementation of Ad Astra also proved to be timely as a new executive team sought to address an impending budget crisis. With scheduling at the center of the academic budget, Stroops saw an opportunity to demonstrate how Ad Astra data could help address the budget crisis by looking at reduction candidates to improve scheduling efficiency.

“This was the best conversation starter,” she said. “Ad Astra provided a tool that could blend data and the art of scheduling together, all supported by reporting and visualization that offered multiple ways to look at our historical and current data.”

The tools implemented to modernize scheduling practices at Mesa Community College would become instrumental in helping the institution save $2.5 million in the annual scheduling budget last year. Its success has the college planning to use Ad Astra data again to reduce the current academic budget by an additional $500,000 this year.

“Ad Astra helps us to work with information from the population we have,” Stroops said. “We can look at student behavior and the particular courses that draw a student to a pathway. The use of Student Demand Forecasting data allows us to create a schedule that places our students on a better completion path.”