completion rate
Texarkana College is built around a clear priority: help students finish. That mission comes with real-world complexity. The college serves many adult learners – the average student age is 27 years old – balancing work, family, and shifting life circumstances. When those pressures hit, students do not always announce they are about to stop out. The institution has to see risk and opportunity early enough to respond.
At the same time, the stakes for getting those decisions right have increased. Texas’ evolving performance landscape means outcomes like completion are tightly connected to institutional planning and resourcing – which makes it even more important to understand where students are progressing and where they are getting stuck.
Before partnering with ZogoTech, Texarkana College was doing what many colleges do: working hard with the tools available. Teams relied on Excel spreadsheets and custom charts to answer questions about enrollment, completion, and program performance. But that approach created friction at the exact moment the college needed speed and confidence. Multi-year trend views were harder to maintain, drill-downs took time, and different groups could end up working from different versions of the truth. Even high-value student success work – like identifying who was close to finishing – could default to imperfect shortcuts, such as relying mainly on a student’s declared major instead of a clearer view of progress toward completion.
Texarkana College wanted a clearer, more usable system – one that could support both institutional effectiveness and student-centered action. That included local visibility into Texas Success Center KPIs and momentum metrics, better HB8 planning, and more reliable ways to spot near-completers so teams could prioritize outreach and help more students cross the finish line.
Texarkana College partnered with ZogoTech to move from spreadsheet-driven reporting to centralized dashboards designed for flexibility, transparency, and daily use. The goal was straightforward: make it easier for leaders and teams to see what is happening now, compare it to prior years, and act with confidence in support of students.
The dashboards were designed around the questions the college asks most often:
This work also reinforced a cultural shift: dashboards were not treated as a niche IR/ IT tool. They became a shared operating view for planning, staffing, and student success execution. As Texarkana President Jason Smith puts it, “Every morning I get on ZogoTech to look through several reports. The first thing I do is look at our enrollment. I’m monitoring daily enrollment trends by program and division, and tracking dual credit by location.”
Texarkana College’s partnership with ZogoTech strengthened student success work in a practical, measurable way: decisions got faster, more consistent, and more aligned to what students actually need to finish.
Greater confidence in planning that directly affects students
When planning becomes more accurate, student support becomes more reliable – course schedules, staffing, advising capacity, and program resourcing all depend on it. Smith described the difference in clarity plainly: “It’s been my primary tool for budget modeling. For the first time in my six years as President, I have complete confidence in our budget needs.”
That confidence is not abstract. In a dynamic environment, small misreads can cascade into fewer sections offered, longer time to completion, or reduced services students rely on. Texarkana College built a stronger foundation for “right-sized” decisions that protect student momentum.
Earlier insight into enrollment movement and process bottlenecks
Enrollment trends are not just a finance concern – they signal student behavior and barriers. Smith noted that “the platform’s granular data has pinpointed bottlenecks in our enrollment process,” and that those insights already informed staffing plans for the following year. Removing friction from enrollment is one of the most direct ways a college can protect access and persistence, especially for working adults who cannot afford delays.
A clearer path from progress data to completion outcomes
Texarkana College has seen strong completion outcomes, including what Smith described as “a breakout year” with a 53.9% completion rate. Sustaining that kind of performance requires more than celebrating outcomes after the fact – it requires daily visibility into who is progressing, who is stalling, and what interventions will matter.
ZogoTech-supported workflows helped the college move beyond proxies like declared major and toward actionable signals, including:
Student experience improvements that show up in real life
For students, the impact is straightforward: fewer surprises, fewer missed opportunities, and more timely support.
What students gain when their college operates with better data:
Smith summed up the change in day-to-day value: “This morning as I was finding data that I had not noticed before, it dawned on me how powerful ZogoTech is and how much I appreciate it.” He also emphasized the broader outcome: “ZogoTech has met – and exceeded – every expectation.”
For Texarkana College, this partnership is not about dashboards as a technology upgrade. It is about turning commitment into execution – using data every day to remove barriers, identify near-completers, and help more students reach the credential and career outcomes that unlock economic mobility.
