File this story under “The Frontiers of Science”:

Student data analytics are not a miracle cure — nor are the models easy to set up — but some institutions represented at the annual Educause conference said they are already seeing the benefits of identifying at-risk students before they drop or fail a course, as opposed to after the fact.

Speakers during back-to-back sessions here Thursday gave participants an introduction to building their own analytics models, then showed how the University of Kentucky is using student data to improve retention. Common to both sessions was a charge that institutions can do more with data they already collect than they do today.

“Just knowing that students dropped out is not enough,” said Rajeev Bukralia, CIO and associate provost for information services at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay. “Once you know what happened and how it happened, then we want to know what could happen in the future.”

Most universities are using analytics on a descriptive level, Bukralia said, where they analyze how students have performed in the past and make changes that will benefit future students. Introducing Kentucky’s approach to analytics in a second session, James David Hardison, an industry principal at the enterprise software developer SAP, said “What if we changed the tense of the question? What if we made the question ‘How are they doing?’ ”

Vince Kellen, Kentucky’s senior vice provost for academic planning, analytics and technologies, later followed up with a sobering reality: “Everything I’m going to show you here, you’re not going to be able to do,” he said. “Your organization won’t be ready for that…. I don’t think the institutions as they’re constructed today can take advantage of analytics. Based on how we’re organized today, something has to change.”

…Kentucky’s push to improve student retention with analytics began in March 2012. The university merged its institutional research and business intelligence teams, hired three data scientists and moved to SAP’s High Performance Analytic Appliance platform. The team (whose size, 15, drew awed reactions from the audience) rebuilt the institution’s mobile app (originally created by Blackboard), which relaunched this semester. The app still serves as a digital gateway to the university, but now does so while collecting tiny bits of information about students.