Analyse Your Students' University Trends with our New Reports

Here’s how you can use BridgeU to track your students’ interest in specific universities, as well as monitor their admissions success.

If you cast your mind back to early April, you might remember that we released the latest update to the BridgeU Analytics feature, designed to help you better understand your students’ interest, shortlist and application trends.

This month, we’re happy to announce that we’re taking this one step further, allowing you to dissect this data on a university-by-university basis.

That’s right - two reporting updates in two months - equalling 5 new charts in total!

With our new university-specific reports, you’ll be able to drill down into each of the universities your students are interested in, in order to:

  • Compare how students from your school have performed year-on-year at a given institution.
  • Understand how grades, test scores and application deadlines have impacted your students’ results.
  • Contextualise the advice you give to future applicants and help them build a balanced application list.

In this blog post, we’ll give you a preview of the new feature and show you how you can make the most of it!

Take a tour of BridgeU's reporting tools

Speak to a member of our team and see how you can use BridgeU to track student trends and make informed improvements to your guidance programme.

How to see university trends in BridgeU

The new reports are accessible to advisors from within the “Universities” tab in BridgeU.

In this tab, you can see a list of all the universities your students have shortlisted or applied to within BridgeU. All you have to do is click on a university to open up more information.

Once you have clicked on a university, you will see an overlay open up with various tabs on the right hand side. The new reports can be found in the “trends” and “scattergram” tabs.

We’ll go into each of them in a bit more detail in the next section…

What you can do with the new reports

Trends

The “trends” report allows you to see how your students have performed year-on-year at a given university. In both a table and a chart format, it shows:

  • How many students added the university to their BridgeU shortlist
  • How many of these students went on to make applications
  • How many of these applications were successful and unsuccessful
  • How many students eventually enrolled in the university

We hope having this information will help you contextualise the advice you give your current students, and lead them towards making a good mix of reach, match and safety applications. You never know - it may serve as an important reality-check for any students who have their heart set on a competitive university!

From a reporting perspective, you can also use this data to analyse how your students’ interests are changing (whether a particular institution is becoming more or less popular), and showcase how your school’s acceptance rates are improving.

Scattergram

With the scattergram, you can dive into this data in a bit more detail, and pinpoint exactly which factors resulted in successful applications to a particular university.

The chart shows all of the students (current and historical) who applied to a certain university, and the outcome of their applications. You’ll also be able to see the predicted grades, test scores and application deadlines for each student.

This visualisation of past student success can help you gage which of your current students have a good chance of being accepted into their chosen institution, and what they might need to improve to get there.

How to make the most of the new reports

As with most reports, the data you get out is only as good as the data you put in! Here’s how you can make sure you get the most accurate results…

Get students using BridgeU

University trends are based on what your students are doing on BridgeU - in particular, the universities they add to their shortlists and application lists. 

If you aren’t already doing so, you can use our Analytics feature to monitor which of your students haven’t completed certain activities, and set them tasks and deadlines to make sure they are progressing through their university research.

Add your students’ grades and test scores

As we mentioned above, the scattergram works by plotting your students’ grades and test scores. If your chart’s looking a little empty, you can add grades and scores for your students either manually or via a bulk upload.

Import your historical data

The university trends shown within BridgeU are also partially based on data from your past graduates.

If your school hasn’t been using BridgeU for very long, or if you don’t have all of your previous students’ application data within the platform, it’s easy to import - either by using our spreadsheet template or through UCAS.

Want to get started straight away? Check out the new reports by logging in to your BridgeU account.

If you’re not a BridgeU customer, and want to learn more about how you can use the data on BridgeU to provide better guidance to your students, book a free demo with us.

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