STARKVILLE – Mississippi State University is teaming up with Amazon Web Services for an artificial intelligence-powered initiative that will use data analysis to improve student and faculty recruitment, alumni engagement and fundraising.
The initiative, at no cost to MSU, will use AI tools developed by Quintilian Inc., an international software company, and powered by AWS, an Amazon subsidiary that provides cloud computing platforms, to analyze data sets and improve how the university interacts with both current and prospective students, alumni, faculty and donors.
“We’re excited about the potential this has to help us, and we believe that we will be effective in this, in that we think this will have an impact on enrollment growth going into the enrollment cliff and other factors,” Salter told The Dispatch on Tuesday. “Any time you get an opportunity to partner with a company of Amazon’s size and resources, it’s hard to turn down.”
Salter said the university maintains data sets across various departments, including the alumni association, athletic department, and academics and those who go through the admissions and scholarship process.
“So all of those data sets overlaid with the Quintillian software will allow us to extract data that will help us make better, more responsive decisions about how we approach the recruitment process,” Salter said.
If there is a prospective student looking to obtain an engineering degree, for example, the system could analyze the student’s preferences, like their preferred price point or willingness to travel, to better tailor recruitment messages.
“Normally when we’ve done this, we’ve been looking at sort of specialty subsets of students,” Salter said. “This will be a much more general approach to enrollment, and we also think it can help us identify among our alumni, our own supporters, those who may have an extra-mile interest in supporting various research that we do or various programs we have.”
The software aims to improve and complement the university’s current recruitment systems, but Salter acknowledged concerns about privacy that typically come with large-scale use of AI. By contract, the university is protecting all proprietary data, he said.
“We certainly are not going to be sharing data with anyone about our donors, about any private matter, but we are going to analyze the data we have in an effort to put our very best foot forward in recruiting, be that a first time student or transfer and be that a graduate student (or) PhD student that is looking at us,” he said. “We’re trying to get the information in front of them as near as possible in their first encounter with us.”
Salter said that partnership was born as Amazon began expanding its presence in Mississippi, including locating new data centers in Madison County. Out of the 16 universities in the Southeastern Conference, he said Amazon selected MSU as the first school to try the software.
Salter said it would have been a hard opportunity for the university to pass up, especially as AI and machine learning become more prevalent in the higher education space.
“We think AI and machine learning is coming, and we will be better off as an institution to to be familiar with it ourselves, to help our students be familiar with it, and to help our incoming faculty and staff know how to interact with it, know the savings and the advancements we can make with it, and also knowing the pitfalls,” Salter said.
AWS Vice President of Education and State and Local Government Kim Majerus said the initiative will transform how the university is able to connect with its stakeholders.
“Their forward-thinking approach transforms how they connect with students, faculty, alumni, and the entire campus community,” Majerus said in a statement emailed to The Dispatch. “By harnessing AWS to unlock valuable data insights, MSU is supercharging student success and administrative efficiency while positioning themselves as true pioneers in educational innovation.”
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
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