Ardeo News
Having our work independently verified is a great honor for us. We enable institutions all over the nation to offer a solution to prospective students and families who are experiencing anxiety about taking out loans to finance enrollment at their college of choice. What we see every day is that LRAPs not only help colleges meet or exceed enrollment goals, but that #LRAPsHelp students and families pursue their education goals with confidence. How do we know? We look at data; our own and that of others.
Independent Data Gathered by a Partner School
When it comes to the ability of our product to perform as designed, there are key indicators that we, of course, regularly monitor and measure on behalf of all our university partners. Nonetheless, it is always good science to have independent reviews that can support and verify any data. Some of our partner schools and other independent consulting organizations have taken the time to collect data about the role that a Loan Repayment Assistance Program can play during the admissions process. One such study unfolded this year (during fall of 2017).
We’ve taken the time on this blog to share some of the successes experienced by one of our partner schools, Keystone College in La Plume, Pennsylvania. We are very proud of their results. After a successful pilot of their LRAP, they took it upon themselves to perform their own independent survey of the impact of their LRAP on the decisions of students and families considering enrollment during their first year offering the program to all incoming freshmen.
All-in-all, according to the school’s own independent review, 35% of the first time, full-time students who responded to their survey reported being greatly influenced to attend Keystone specifically because of The Keystone Commitment Loan Repayment Assistance Program.
Beyond that, the school discovered that 66% of the respondents indicated the Keystone program to have greatly or somewhat influenced their decision to attend college generally, with 72% reporting having been greatly or somewhat influenced to attend Keystone College specifically.
Keystone wanted to know that the effort to build their LRAP into a broader “distinctives” building initiative and set themselves apart in the minds of prospective students and families was an effort that produced solid results. What they found in their own independent review confirmed this to be the case.
You can read more by visiting the case studies page on our website.
Our Internal Data Gathering Process
Many times, when we discuss the findings we have encountered through our data collection efforts or that of others, the immediate response we get is that the program sounds too good to be true. That’s why, when we are gathering data for ourselves about the effectiveness of our product for our partners, we use methods that are even more strict than those of our partners and peers.
We want to be able to know the number of students who “except for the LRAP” would not have been able to enroll at our partner school. That helps us verify the solidity of the impact. We survey students who are being offered a program from partner school, and we report that information to the schools along with collections of testimonial comments that students and families make showing how much value it adds for them.
You might have seen some of the testimonials that we have received over the years, as we excited to share them over our social channels and on our website. We love it when we get the chance to elevate the good that LRAP does on our partner campuses, and to further support our strong belief that LRAPs are both good for our university partners’ enrollment strategies, and good for the individual students and families. LRAP enables those students to select our partner schools and be free from fear about student loan debt after graduation, and the data shows that over, and over again.
