Version 2022.1 – February 19, 2022

Strategies

The Othot team has a thorough understanding of the many challenging decisions that need to be made every day at all levels of a Strategic Enrollment Management team. The new Strategize tab found in the Insights page presents a new user experience to help you make these critical decisions faster and more easily by simply answering a few straight-forward questions. More Strategies will be introduced over time, while the first two being made available are focused on helping with Financial Aid offers that occur after initial packaging:

• Yield Booster
  It’s often a guessing game for deciding how to allocate discretionary awards when making the final push towards reaching enrollment goals. With Yield Booster, simply answer a few questions about your situation then be presented with the optimal allocation by student expected to maximize your limited aid resources, specifically to increase yield.
• Appeals Manager*
  When students or their parents submit a financial aid appeal, it can be incredibly difficult to decide if it should be granted and, if so, to what extent. Whether it’s a single student or many students who’ve made the request, use the Appeals Manager to see the impact of either the optimal decision or any amount that you would consider offering for these critical funds.
  *Will automatically become available with the first 2022.1 patch within weeks following the release date.

Dynamic Progress-based Likelihood Scores

In addition to the hundreds or thousands of variables that can be used to predict outcomes, the impact of time relative to deadlines is often significant. Othot’s Likelihood Scores now automatically factor in the progress already observed in your funnel or life cycle to better account for the temporal nature of the path towards enrollment or retention.

For example, an Applicant with qualities that would typically result in a high Likelihood Score will now possess a much lower prediction if enough students have been admitted and deposited already. This dynamic update based on progress will enable you to better focus your resources on the right students at the right time.

This update to Likelihood Scores will persist everywhere in the Analyze page when the Rewind feature is not in use, including but not limited to individual student pages, in prescriptive modules (i.e. What-if, Sensitivity, Matrix, and Scenario), Pivot, and visualizations.

Financial Aid Sensitivity Smoothing

Your ability to make confident decisions with your financial aid resources by predicting the outcomes before acting is one of Othot’s highest priorities. Our data science engine has significantly improved its ability to detect outliers in simulated financial aid offers and make appropriate adjustments automatically. This enhancement results in predictions that better represent a student’s price sensitivity when using any prescriptive features in the Platform.