Marketing savvy for academia

SAS® software helps UCAS and the British higher education sector to move with the times and capitalise on new opportunities

The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) annually processes 2.2 million applications for full-time higher education courses from 550,000 Home, EU and Overseas candidates, on behalf of 322 member institutions. Essentially, its mission is to help students to find the right courses, and universities and colleges to find the right students.

UCAS has charity status, which means it is not allowed to generate income apart from the standard capitation fee to the member institutions and applicant fees.

However, higher education has undergone some important changes recently, and UCAS needed to move with the times.  From 2006, British universities have been free to set fees for their courses and institutions are now finding the market more competitive as an increasing number of overseas institutions are offering English speaking courses. Member institutions are now becoming much more reliant on understanding how they fit into the higher education marketplace.

In August 2006, UCAS Media (the commercial subsidiary of UCAS) set up a Data Insight team to capitalise on these new realities.  It chose SAS to provide member organisations with the information they need to help them fill places with the most suitable students and hit their recruitment targets.

Analysing the current application cycle

"Universities are marketing their courses much more aggressively than in the past," says Alyson Walsh, who is Manager of UCAS Data Insight.

Students now submit applications online which means that we have data available more quickly.  Using SAS as the processing solution, UCAS Data Insight analyses that applications data and presents it as easy to use information which any member Higher Education Institution (HEI) can subscribe to.  All revenues are then passed on to the charity side of the organisation under a covenant arrangement. "This new revenue stream is helping UCAS to improve our services to students and member institutions," says Walsh.

"Knowledge drives effective marketing," says Walsh. "Universities want to know who is applying for their courses, where they are and which applications are most likely to be successful. They have limited resources, so they want to pinpoint their marketing efforts where they have most effect. They want to send direct communications only to people who are likely to be successful candidates for their courses".

Complex and sensitive data

Simon Dukes is one of the Analysts in the Data Insight team. He says, "Our data is becoming ever more complex.  For example, we take more and more applications from different parts of the world with different education systems and qualification data so we needed a sophisticated and powerful tool like SAS to analyse it.

UCAS Data Insight needs to harness the raw data, aggregate it and slice and dice it for analysis, with the standard processes automated.

"This is what SAS is really good at. It provides power and flexibility that simply is not available in other software," says Dukes.

"I have tried other packages but I always come back to SAS because it is so easy to use, and we can build in our own quality controls. This is important as we build up a team of analysts who are new to the Higher Education sector" says Walsh.

"SAS also gives us the security controls we need," she adds. "The information held by UCAS is commercially sensitive and valuable so we need to eliminate the risk that it will be sent to the wrong HEI."

Universities are especially interested to understand trends in applications. Which courses are becoming more popular, and which less so? Which courses are currently over-subscribed and which under-subscribed? Before UCAS Media set up the Data Insight Team, it was difficult and time-consuming to answer these questions before it was too late, i.e. before the main applications deadline in January. Getting the answers earlier on in the process can make a major difference to an institution's marketing and planning.  If an institution discovers for example, that an engineering course is having problems attracting applicants in the United Kingdom, it might want to promote the course more actively to overseas students.

The UCAS Data Insight team also offers member institutions the opportunity to benchmark their performance against other colleges and universities. This can be very revealing: A university might think that its Media Studies course is proving highly attractive because applications are five percent up on previous years - until it discovers that similar institutions offering a similar course are experiencing a 20 percent increase in applications!

Subscriber services

Most information requests are ad hoc, but the UCAS Data Insight team is also analysing data and information and sending it out automatically to subscribers, for example through its Application Tracker offering.  We've had some very positive feedback for the service and the early adopters are seeing a return on their investment by knowing how they are performing in the sector.  "Having this information easily available allows people to identify critical trends before they become problems," says Walsh.

"Most requests come from the universities' marketing departments, market research people and admissions staff. But the user community is extending to other job functions," says Dukes.

"Institutions want to identify students who perhaps don't meet the standard admission criteria, but would nevertheless do well on their chosen course. So we are getting more and more requests from 'widening access' coordinators, whose remit is to increase student diversity," adds Walsh.

Next steps

"We are already breaking new ground, but SAS is a highly scalable solution, and we know that the possibilities are endless," says Walsh. The team plans to go much further with the analytics that it offers. One of our next planned projects is to use regression and CHAID analysis techniques to identify the key variables (such as location and ethnic or social background) that influence the success (or otherwise) of an application.

"As we are becoming more information rather than process-driven, the use of SAS is growing across UCAS. We now have the critical mass necessary to enable us to share best practices across all functions and departments," concludes Walsh.

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