Monitoring Advising Analytics to Promote Success (MAAPS): Evaluation Findings from the First Year of Implementation

In 2015, estimated bachelor’s degree attainment rates by age 24 were nearly five times greater for those from the highest family income quartile than for those from the lowest quartile (58 percent vs. 12 percent). Lower graduation rates of low-income students are not fully explained by lack of academic preparation, and a growing number of research studies attribute this achievement gap, at least in part, to low-income students’ lack of “institutional know-how”—their ability to navigate the complex bureaucracies that characterize modern universities, to choose appropriate majors, to register for the right courses at the right times, and to diagnose when they are off path and need to make corrections. The Monitoring Advising Analytics to Promote Success (MAAPS) project was designed to address this issue by enhancing and bringing to scale intensive, proactive coaching interventions that were shown to increase student retention by nine to fourteen percent. This report presents evaluation findings from the 2016-2017 academic year, the first year of implementation of the MAAPS study.