Case Study

Grayson College

Keeping a Pulse on Student Progress: How Grayson College Uses Data to Intervene Earlier and Complete More Credentials

22-year high

term-to-term retention

20-year high

in student success rates

109%

increase in personal counseling appointments

200%

increase in gas voucher program

The Situation

Grayson College is a rural community college in Denison, Texas, serving roughly 4,000 to 5,000 students pursuing transfer, workforce credentials, and career advancement. Like many rural-serving institutions, Grayson College’s students often balance work, transportation, and basic needs challenges alongside academics. In that reality, timing matters. When a student starts to disengage, misses classes, or slips academically, the window to respond can be measured in days, not weeks.

Grayson College’s student success teams have long been committed to meeting students where they are, but the institution reached a point where its goals outgrew its tools. With a quality enhancement plan tied to its reaffirmation work in 2021, leaders recognized the need for a more coordinated, up-to-date view of student progress to make early intervention consistent across roles. Advisors, success coaches, faculty, and support programs all had pieces of the story, but Grayson College wanted a shared foundation that could answer practical questions quickly:

Which students are showing early signs of risk right now?
What patterns are emerging by program, modality, or student population?
Which students are on track to return next term, and who is at risk of stopping out?
Which students are already eligible to graduate, and how can Grayson College award credentials more efficiently?

Grayson College needed broader access to trusted data across faculty, success coaches, and departments so staff could identify patterns sooner, coordinate outreach, and measure whether supports were improving persistence, completion, and credential attainment.

The Solution

Grayson College uses ZogoTech to bring key student signals into a shared, action-oriented view that supports earlier outreach, better coordination, and faster decisions. Rather than waiting for end-of-term outcomes, Grayson College teams use dashboards to monitor leading indicators like engagement, attendance patterns, and course performance, then act while students still have time to recover.

What made the approach work at Grayson College was how quickly it spread through real use cases. Faculty dashboards were built first, and success coaches immediately requested the same capability filtered to their caseloads. As additional departments saw how accessible and trusted the data was, they began requesting dashboards tailored to their workflows, reducing reliance on manual collection and time-consuming report requests.

Across campus, Grayson College uses ZogoTech in several distinct ways:

Early alerts and proactive student outreach: Success coaches, faculty, and support teams receive early alerts that identify students who may be at risk based on attendance, performance, and patterns of concern.
Trend monitoring for academic planning: Leadership uses current trends by program and student characteristics to guide scheduling, resource allocation, and planning.
Term-to-term persistence monitoring and targeted campaigns: Grayson College identifies students enrolled in one term who have not yet registered for the next and sends targeted outreach to keep students on track.
Institutional Research and rapid response: Leadership and Institutional Research can answer program and department questions quickly using timely dashboards.
Pathways Analytics: Near-completer and possible completer tools help identify students who are eligible to graduate and accelerate credential awarding – an important lever as Texas continues shifting toward outcomes-based funding, where credential attainment matters.

Nancy Luthe, Director of Success Coaches, described how the Early Alert Dashboard changes the pace of intervention by giving coaches a weekly view of what students are experiencing: “We can see their login activity, their grades, if they’re attending courses and where they’re at in the current week. We don’t have to wait till the end of the semester when grades are posted.”

Luthe also described how Grayson College uses term-to-term monitoring to convert insight into action: “We look at term-to-term retention. We’ll take a look at the students enrolled in the fall semester. If they’re not enrolled in the spring, we’ll send a link in a text message. We see huge peaks in appointments coming in, and it has increased our term-to-term retention.”

Faculty use the same shared insight to support student success conversations. Carla Fanning, M.S., Chair of Social Sciences and Professor of Psychology, shared how she uses ZogoTech to understand when students are showing early signs of trouble and to enter conversations with better context: “As faculty, I use ZogoTech to check on students of concern due to: grade drops, missing assignments, absences, email messages, etc. I also use it for demographic information when I fact check a student’s explanation. The information from ZogoTech provides me a better understanding of students before I talk with them so I can help them.”

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Designing an Early Alert Program for Student Success and Persistence

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“We wanted faculty to have the power. We wanted to democratize the data. We wanted them to be excited about the data... And instead of having to request through our IE/IR department, they would have it at their fingertips.”

Dr. Logan Maxwell

Director of Success Initiatives

The Benefits

Grayson College’s approach has strengthened student success work in ways that are both measurable and operational. The most important shift is not simply access to data — it is the ability to act earlier, coordinate support across teams, and follow through with consistency.

Earlier intervention that matches the pace of student need: Success coaches and faculty can identify risk signals while a student still has time to respond. That changes support from reactive to preventive — helping students adjust before falling too far behind to recover.
Student success and course completion at a 20-year high: Grayson College reports a 20-year high in student success rates, supported by stronger identification of students who need intervention and more targeted academic support.
Stronger persistence through targeted term-to-term outreach: By identifying students who have not yet registered for the next term and reaching them quickly, Grayson College has strengthened persistence patterns across student populations. Grayson College also reported a 3% increase in fall-to-spring retention over the last year, reaching a 22-year high.
Clearer measurement of student support impact through Grayson Cares: Grayson College uses data to connect students to Grayson Cares services and monitor how students receiving support are performing over time. As Corey Leird, LCSWi, Grayson Cares Coordinator, noted: “ZogoTech has changed how our team works by giving us real-time visibility into attendance patterns and student success indicators. That allows us to identify students who may be struggling and connect them to Grayson Cares sooner. We can also track how students receiving support are performing over time, helping us refine services and strengthen persistence and success.”
Greater utilization of support services aligned to student needs: As Grayson College connected early signals to outreach and referrals, it gained visibility into the supports students are using. Grayson College reported substantial increases in services such as personal counseling appointments (109% increase) and the gas voucher program (near 200% increase), along with increased food pantry usage. Those patterns gave Grayson College evidence to adjust staffing and capacity in high-demand areas.
Faster, more accurate decision-making beyond Student Success: Because dashboards refresh frequently and draw from trusted institutional sources, departments can replace time-consuming downloads with workflows that allow staff to pull what they need quickly and act in minutes rather than hours.
More credentials awarded and stronger alignment to outcomes-based funding: Pathways Analytics enables Grayson College to identify students who have met graduation requirements or are near completion, allowing more efficient awarding of credentials and more focused outreach to bring students back to finish. This supports completion goals and strengthens alignment with Texas’ House Bill 8 outcomes-based funding model, where credential attainment is a core driver of institutional performance.

Grayson College’s work with ZogoTech reflects a clear strategy: make student progress visible early enough to act, and make that visibility usable for the people closest to students. By pairing early alert dashboards with targeted retention outreach and pathways-based completion tools, Grayson College has strengthened its ability to intervene sooner, connect students to the right supports, and complete more credentials. The outcome is not simply better reporting, but a more responsive student success system that helps more students stay enrolled, succeed in courses, and move forward into family-sustaining careers and continued education.