Our purpose is to improve the student experience and outcomes by responsibly leveraging data science and analytics to inform better decision‑making. By providing timely, actionable insights to students, faculty, advisers, and administrators, our team creates clearer pathways to degree completion, removes structural barriers to success, and ensures that more students are able to achieve their educational goals efficiently and equitably.

As a public university, UW has a responsibility to steward resources wisely, expand access, and maximize impact for students and the broader community. We meet these responsibilities by transforming data into insight and insight into action. 

Our current objectives are to:

Improve Student Success and Experience
Provide students with clear, intuitive, and accurate information that helps them:

• Discover degrees, majors, and courses aligned with their goals and interests
• Understand degree requirements and recommended academic pathways
• Make informed decisions that reduce trial-and-error course taking

This clarity lowers frustration, shortens time to degree, and builds student confidence and engagement.

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Enable Proactive Advising and Early Intervention
Equip advisers, instructors, and student-support staff with analytics-driven “early alerts” to:

• Identify students at risk of stopping out, falling off-track, or accumulating excess credits
• Detect complex or inefficient academic pathways early
• Intervene with targeted, timely support rather than reactive remediation 

This enables ongoing, proactive advising–so we can support students early instead of responding after problems arise. This shifts advising from episodic and reactive to continuous and preventative.

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These two objectives will support students and the university by:

1. Reducing Student Debt and Financial Burden. By helping students complete degrees efficiently and avoid unnecessary credits, the student will face:

• lower overall tuition cost
• reduced reliance on loans
• less financial stress for students and families.

2. Increasing capacity and fulfilling the public mission

• Improving retention and on-time graduation allows UW to: 
• admit and graduate more students with existing resources
• serve more Washington State residents and fulfill its public mandate
• improve course planning and instructional capacity through improved demand forecasting.
• Strengthening equity and access outcomes

3. Equity-centered analytics can help UW: 

• identify and address gaps in student outcomes across populations
• evaluate the effectiveness of academic and support programs
• ensure that interventions benefit those most impacted by systemic barriers
• Supporting workforce readiness and economic impact

 4. Helping students complete degrees sooner and with clearer academic direction: 

• Accelerates entry into the workforce
• increases lifetime earnings and economic mobility
• strengthens the regional and state economy with skilled graduates
• creates long-term benefits such as savings, retirement readiness, and reduced social costs.
• Improving institutional decision making and planning

5. Provide leadership and operational teams with trusted, consistent analytics to: 

• inform academic program development and sunsetting
• optimize course scheduling and resource allocation
• evaluate policy changes using data rather than anecdote