Things also "work" if you are able to scale down a cost (employment of human labor such as teachers and counselors) while maintaining or scaling up a source of

Things also "work" if you are able to scale down a cost (employment of human labor such as teachers and counselors) while maintaining or scaling up a source of revenue (student enrollment.) This is an unfortunate truth. Schools grow, don't scale human labor to accommodate additional students, overall student performance & dropouts increase, and their answer is to recruit more students in a downward spiral. Never mind the fact that it costs more money to do this than simply hiring 2 or 3 more advisors to do real human outreach. I saw this cycle over the course of 4 or 5 years where I work. After providing hard analysis of this pattern each year, I, working with colleagues on the academic side of things, managed to push for those advising resources and the results have more than paid for it. The problem is that many of the idealistic tech people are only looking at the problem from the tech point of view. I have resisted efforts over the years to assimilate me into a central IT division because the viewpoint I get through being embedded in an operational division strongly informs my analytical efforts. I see the business cycle, I talk to advisors, I construct & analyze surveys that mix quantitative and qualitative factors-- there is no detail of the student experience that is too small for me to ignore. It hammers home the point that analysis & tech can only help focus the efforts of human labor, not replace it.