Episode 104: Jeremy Anderson on the Metrics that Matter in Mergers & Acquisitions
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What are the best metrics to measure the student journey? How can you use these to structure mergers and acquisitions, consolidations, and partnerships among institutions? How can you manage the change process to create a positive impact on the student journey? We dive into these questions as Jeremy Anderson shares his personal experience with assessment, technology, and M&A and in higher ed.
The landscape of higher education is shifting rapidly, particularly for small, private institutions facing regional pressure and declining enrollments. When a college closes its doors suddenly, the impact on students is devastating. Research indicates that less than half of students from a sudden closure continue their enrollment, and of those, only a third complete their credential. This equates to a staggering one-in-six chance of success following a disruption.
However, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in higher education don’t have to be a narrative of loss. When approached through the lens of student success and intentional consolidation, these partnerships can create more resilient, mission-aligned institutions. By moving away from a "takeover" mentality and toward a "stronger together" philosophy, colleges can bridge gaps, eliminate friction, and ensure that the student journey remains uninterrupted.
Defining Success: Starting with Student Intention
To navigate a successful merger, an institution must first have a clear definition of student success. Traditionally, offices of Institutional Research (IR) have focused on lagging indicators like retention and completion rates. While important, these metrics don't tell the full story of the individual student.
A more modern approach involves "backwards design." This means starting with the student’s specific intention—whether that is transferring to a four-year university, earning a specific credential, or starting a new career—and personalizing the experience to meet that goal. By understanding early momentum metrics, such as whether a student is taking the "right" courses for their major or enrolling with the proper credit intensity, institutions can provide proactive support rather than reactive solutions.
The Strategy of Intentional Consolidation
In the current higher education climate, M&A should be viewed as a way to grow inorganically and expedite strategic pillars that an institution might not be able to achieve on its own. The goal is "one plus one equals three." This involves finding complementary partners where the strengths of one institution amplify the needs of the other.
For example, a university with a robust digital transformation model (like the "Soul" model) might partner with an institution that excels in non-credit-to-credit on-ramps for adult learners. Rather than one school forcing its culture onto the other, both institutions "adapt and adopt" the best practices of their partner. This ensures that the combined entity is more capable of serving a diverse, career-minded student population than either was individually.
Mapping the Process to Eliminate Bad Friction
The "glue" that holds a merger together is the process mapping. During an integration, leaders must look at the nitty-gritty of how students move through the system. The goal is to identify and remove "bad friction"—the unnecessary handoffs, system errors, and bureaucratic hurdles that cause students to fall through the cracks.
While automation and AI offer tools to streamline these processes, it is vital to maintain "good friction." Good friction includes intentional touchpoints, such as required advising sessions or career alignment conversations, that force a student to slow down and engage with their journey. By removing the administrative bottlenecks and increasing high-value human interactions, institutions can maintain high retention rates even during the complex transition of a merger.
Conclusion: Creating a Connected College
Ultimately, a successful merger is about the human layer. It requires faculty and staff to understand the "why" behind the change and to remain focused on the student as a whole person, not just a data point. When institutions combine their missions intentionally, they don't just survive—they create a more connected, resilient environment where students are empowered to succeed.
Episode 104 Transcript
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Elliot Felix: So welcome Jeremy. I'm so excited for our conversation about M&A and student success.
Jeremy Anderson: I am super excited to be here. I appreciate the invite, Elliot.
Elliot Felix: Tell us a little bit about how you got started in higher ed and what you're up to today.
Jeremy Anderson: Yeah, it sure has. And my story is very non-linear. I actually started as a high school teacher—history and social sciences. And in my state of Connecticut where I come from, it was required that you have a master's degree. So I had to really think about what do I wanna be when I grow up? And that's when technology and data really gave me a bite. Once I got into my master's program, I started to think about how do I even grow my influence on student success beyond the individual classroom. Through that process, I actually met some folks who were connected to Quinnipiac University where there happened to be an opening. And they said, let's have you come and be an instructional designer, technologist. And I got into higher ed and I just realized there was this whole other world of working with faculty and service units to really drive student success. Looking at how technology and data can really transform the student experience and get more students through just success.
Jeremy Anderson: That really became my driving forces—to work with as many different clients on campus to understand our students, understand the indicators, the early indicators of their success. The long-term outcomes that we're trying to drive towards, and how do we start to close those gaps by improving services, improving curriculum instruction so that it's been like a 20 year long journey, getting to that point.
Elliot Felix: That's such an interesting journey and it seems like technology and data and working across these different functions is the through line. Those things have changed a lot and I think certainly we went from too little to too much. And now, too much reactive and looking back as opposed to predictive.
Jeremy Anderson: It's been this very interesting kind of evolution in all of my roles though, with lots of stops along the way in different functions reporting into me. I am now at this point where working with an institutional research office here in my current role. And then our Persistence Completion Graduation Committee. We're developing out these really cool tools like the student profile to get a better sense of who our students are. We're building out an early momentum metrics model to understand how they're experiencing the college experience—first term, first year. A predictive model—are they gonna make it into their second year? And then this much larger product of a program vitality—really it's a tool set, a set of dashboards that asks how are students going through at a program level? What are the bottlenecks? How well are these programs producing from a margin perspective? So it's really an institutional management tool that's rooted in student success. And on the other side of that coin, institutional success because we do need to be producing across the portfolio in a fiscally responsible way.
Elliot Felix: Looking ahead. As you reflect on this and as you think about momentum metrics and your dashboards, what are the metrics that define student success for you?
Jeremy Anderson: Oh boy, that's a really good question. The place where I start, and it's why we are actually working on a student profile here at my current institution, is what the student's intention is. I am a big believer in backwards design and then personalizing the experience for whatever that outcome is that the student's after. So when I think about what success is: if a student fills out on that questionnaire that I intend to transfer, and then we ask them a question in how much time do you intend to transfer? What institution do you intend to go to? So we ask them a suite of questions about that, or if they intend to earn a credential. Then there's the follow-on questions about, what do you intend to do as a career after you leave? And we start to really think about the student—their goals, their intentions, their vision for the future.
Jeremy Anderson: Then the measure of success is, how many of our students are actually getting through to those targets, their personal goals, their timelines, the careers that they're after. And if we are doing that, then there's all sorts of leading indicators along the way. Are they enrolling in the right courses to get them to those degrees, to the right careers, to the transfer pathway? Are they enrolling with the right intensity, the number of credits to get them through at their timeline? Are we connecting them to the right financial aid based on their personal finances? Which is another set of questions we're gonna be asking in the student profile. So it's really about thinking about where's that student's journey, what does their individual journey look like? And then what are those measures along the way? Again, it's gonna have to be tailored to that student to see if they're on the path or not. So when I think about those metrics, it's not necessarily just the retention and the completion rates that historically an IR office would be really keenly focused on. It really has to be more about what our students want and are we getting them there effectively?
Elliot Felix: Starting from the student goals and then working backwards to design the journey to get there makes so much sense. I love these examples about are they taking the right courses? Are they connected to the right supports? Are they taking the right amount or intensity? How do you measure "right courses"? Is that percent distribution in your intended major or something like that, to make sure people aren't wandering—or they're wandering just the right amount, or exploring the right amount and focusing just the right amount?
Jeremy Anderson: The place where I like to start, and this is what I love about the Guided Pathways framework, is that you have these kind of buckets of credits that a student has to earn and you as much as you can, you tighten up what's in each of those buckets so that it's laser-focused. When the student is looking at this list of courses, they know it's gonna fit into this bucket. So that's the idea that I would start with—we've gotta very well define what are these things that the students need to ultimately check the box on. Then exactly like you said, what we're doing is we're looking to see are the students actually taking those courses or not? So it is an on-path, off-path percentage that I would say is really the metric that we're after. We're looking at that for really for the first time as an organization right now at my current institution. Because we do wanna know that we've got students who might have a primary declaration of program, but they have maybe 10 other things that they've expressed interest in. They're all declared programs, but they're secondary and we wanna understand what's their true intent? They may have on the application declared this primary, but somewhere along the way we're seeing, wait, that's not actually what they're enrolling in. Now, can we reach out to them and have the advising conversation about, let's get you with the right major, and if you're intending to transfer, let's have that conversation again—are these the right courses that are gonna go to that institution that you're aiming to go to? So that's really how we wanna be looking at it. And that's the Guided Pathways journey for sure.
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Elliot Felix: Yeah, which makes a lot of sense. There's a study I cite in my book—I think it was researchers at University of Minnesota—and they looked at 30-some thousand and it was like a direct correlation between percentage of courses in major and graduation time. And how you get that right balance of focusing and exploring, how you do the exploring early in your journey. It's tricky, but I think it's exciting that you're looking at it. We're talking about the student journey and also thinking about a topic that I think is near and dear to both of our hearts, which is M&A. I think we've each experienced it firsthand. I, in terms of starting, scaling, and selling Brightspot to Buro Happold where I now lead the advisory practice. And you having gone through an M&A merger, acquisition, collaboration, partnership—obviously these things are called so many different things. I'd love to hear a little bit about your experience with that, because that can be like a break in the student journey. It can be a disruption, it can be an amplification, it can be an enhancement. Obviously we want it to be more the latter.
Jeremy Anderson: Yeah, so M&A in my prior institution and prior role was something that was part of my portfolio of responsibility and we were really looking at it as a way to inorganically grow with our strategic plan. How do we take these four or five pillars that we have, and how do we expedite it in a way that we couldn't do on our own? So that was at the beginning of the process. Before we even started to identify potential partners, we were really thinking about what is it that we're trying to do? What is that strategy? What's that checklist that we're then gonna be looking for in these other institutions? So I started all the way from that part of the process and then went through prospect identification, prospect scoring, then relationship building all the way through due diligence and then definitive agreement. This is a pretty well-established pattern here that you can borrow from other industries, but it was really the front half of that acquisition. Then I transitioned into a support role as we moved into the integration planning, and then I eventually moved out of that organization. So I would say the expertise there is really in the front half of how do you develop the M&A strategy, how do you identify the right fit, the right partners, and then ultimately how do you start to translate that down to the nitty-gritty of getting the two institutions together, making sure the students are successful. Because if that doesn't happen, it's not worth it.
Jeremy Anderson: Sitting on that acquisition side of the equation, that was how Bay Path was coming at this. We knew that there were a lot of institutions, particularly small privates that have a regional footprint, under a ton of pressure, particularly in the Northeast. So we're looking at the landscape and we're realizing that, as these closures are happening—like Mount Ida—you know those students are having a tough time. There's research from SHEEO and the National Student Clearinghouse from a couple of years ago that less than half of those students in a sudden closure actually continue their enrollment. And then of those half that do continue to enroll, only about a third of them actually complete a credential. So you're talking a one-in-six chance when you don't have a well-structured process.
Elliot Felix: Incredibly disruptive.
Jeremy Anderson: Incredibly. Think about the amount of time, effort, money that students have put into it, the debt that they've taken on, and it's all for naught. Five out of the six students in a sudden closure. Our thought was, this is an opportunity to avoid that. This is intentional consolidation in the industry. This is looking for partners that we can merge our missions together and be more resilient together. And it's, not to be trite, but it's that one-plus-one-equals-three way of thinking about things. So that's the philosophy. And then it had to trickle down to, when we're looking for partners at the institutional level, we've gotta look for those kinds of complementary or overlapping strengths that can amplify the combined entity. But then from a student perspective, it's not enough to just throw two institutions together and hope for the best. We had to really intentionally sit down and think about how do we map these programs to one another? How do we ensure that students take in the maximum number of credits? How do we ensure that the advisors understand how to help that student transition from the one institution to the combined? How do we ensure that things like career services are still talking to the students when we're now serving two different geographic areas? So it was about integrating the services and really systems and processes to make sure that the student had a clean through-line and they weren't just falling through cracks left and right. And it started with this very intentional way of communicating to the student at the front end about why are we merging, what does this timeline look like, making all assurances about what your pathway is. And because of that, there was a very high retention rate through that process.
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Elliot Felix: It's a great way of thinking about it. And it seems like you outlined at least three components: How do you make one-plus-one-equals-three? How do you do the mapping between programs? And how do you provide continuity in terms of services and support? And it'd be great to unpack those. On the one-plus-one-equals-three part, that's what really struck me. You wrote a reflection on LinkedIn about one lesson—you were talking about the key thing you learned is reframing it from one acquiring another to "we're making something new together." Having been on different ends of that myself, to me that was really like an aha moment. Talk to us a little bit about creating something new together.
Jeremy Anderson: Yeah, this is, I think, probably the toughest part of the process because that's the human layer—working with faculty and staff to understand the "why." Why are we doing this? We could continue to be separate, but we're stronger together. So the best example that I have, there were these complementary skills that the two institutions had, yet at the same time, very similar missions, very similar student populations. If we're able to lever these two different strength areas and bring them together, it's not a wholesale "you're going to do this." It's very much how do we bring together our practices? On the Bay Path side, they had spent a long time developing out what they call the Soul model—a digital transformation, student-centered with data systems, processes, and people around the student. It resulted in industry-leading persistence and completion rates. So we had the skillset, and it wasn't about "we're just gonna throw Soul on top of Cambridge College." It was about helping Cambridge College understand these are the components and tools we have in place, and if you begin to adopt them, you can have the same impacts. Ultimately, once we get through that integration, we will then have a shared competency that will also have been able to borrow some things from your end.
Jeremy Anderson: They had been working with this student population—adult serving, very diverse background, very career-minded, just like Bay Path. They had developed though this competency about on-ramps through non-credit learning that could articulate to credit. And they'd been doing this for about 10 or 15 years. They had all this expertise that we were hoping we were going to develop, but we didn't have 15 years to do it. So we started to ask how does this work and how can we adapt it into our current partnerships work? It was a lot of just borrowing of practice across the two institutions. That's where we're not just taking wholesale what Cambridge did or what Bay Path did. We're borrowing the pieces that work and we're making this new institution that has combined strengths.
Elliot Felix: From your discussion about the student journey and these two institutions, I'm visualizing a gap. You're bringing these two things together and there's gonna be some daylight in between them which students, staff, faculty, processes, and policies have to bridge. How do you do that mapping? I went through this myself where it's: these are our salary bands, these are our titles, these are our values, this is our culture. These are our key business processes, these are our tools, this is the data, these are our metrics. What are yours? And then you connect them.
Jeremy Anderson: Yeah, what's really interesting is I come to this with kind of a skillset from the IT and data part of the world where it's business analysis. What you're really trying to do is understand how does a process work, how do people fit into it, how does the technology enable it? We're trying to make our processes frictionless. We had developed that Soul model from scratch with all of these process maps, with understanding of swim lanes of roles and how does technology handoff happen? How does data enable the student to move through? It required process mapping. If you get right down to it, these are processes and you have to understand how they work. It was great to have that background because we were able to then during diligence to say, "Okay, how do you do these things?" And it's not that we were making the map during the diligence process, but we had a rough sense of those key top 10 or so processes and how they worked at Cambridge. And we can start to blend these things together so we're not running inefficiently two very different ways of doing business. But I would say that's how you glue—the glue is the process.
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Elliot Felix: So what are your favorite process mapping tools and techniques? Is this like post-its on a whiteboard? Is it a sophisticated software?
Jeremy Anderson: I'm laughing because I'm old school and I like to get up at a whiteboard with a group of people in a room and draw arrows on the board. There were other people on my team—our registrar is very much about sticky notes. We're both lo-fi. Then we had people on the team like our AVP of technology and our AVP of data who were big into Miro boards. We had folks who like to do Visio. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter as long as you're getting down into brass tacks about how students move through this process and what are those gates along the way.
Elliot Felix: And when you're looking at a process map and you're trying to provide continuity in the student journey and bridge these two institutions, what are your rules of thumb or the red flags you're looking for? Is it recursive loops, or too many steps?
Jeremy Anderson: The way I would characterize all of it is friction. Anywhere where there are more handoffs than you would want. The ideal is there is no handoff. The person who is running the process runs the process. So the fewer handoffs the better. You're looking at how many swim lane changes there are, how many times data has to move between systems, the wait time between these gates or queue time in different offices. There's lots of different ways to quantify what friction is, but that's the concept—how do we take out as much time and as much handoff as we can so that the student can get through as quickly as possible to a successful outcome. It's not just the process mapping; it's continuous iteration and improvement of the process.
Elliot Felix: That's a great way of putting it. I wrote a newsletter on good versus bad friction. A lot of what our job is in higher ed is to increase the "good friction"—things like stretch assignments that challenge students to build new skills and relationships. And then there's "bad friction"—I have a registration hold, it says it's a tuition balance but turns out to be a financial aid issue, and I have to go to three different places and wait on hold. If we can have more good friction and less bad friction, we're going in the right direction.
Jeremy Anderson: Take out the bad friction. I'm right there with you. I'll give you a good example where we intentionally did slow things down. It was at that critical moment of student onboarding. We wanted more touchpoints, not fewer, because if the student comes in with a really good understanding of their academic program, the careers it leads to, the finances—that's a double benefit. It helps them take agency and helps us understand the path. The increased "good friction" was we required them to meet with their advisor to talk about their program, talk to career services about their interests, and speak with financial aid about their package. You could look at that and say "whoa, there's a ton of touchpoints here." Our enrollment management folks want students into classes as quickly as possible, but if what you're really looking to do is get students through to completion and a career, then having a little bit of friction there at that transition point pays huge dividends. Satisfaction with advising and career services was off the chart—20% higher than traditional students. Good friction is good friction.
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Elliot Felix: Sometimes more steps and more touches is really useful, and I think it's increasingly important to discern that as we enter the age of AI and automation. People go through their processes and think "what can I automate? Where can I take humans out?" But you have to be careful because you might lose high-value opportunities. One of my favorite examples is Zingerman's Deli in Ann Arbor. One of the owners—when I was there—the lowest skill job is probably pouring water at each table. That's what the owner does because pouring the water gave him a chance to go to each table and check in on people. He took what might be the easiest to automate and said, "No, this is great because it gives me an excuse to talk to my customers." You really have to pick your spots.
Jeremy Anderson: Yeah, I had a period where I had some staff turnover and I had an unplanned opportunity to do very much like this. I became the frontline help desk technician while also being a chief over technology and analytics. That opportunity to talk to the customer about how they're experiencing their course—but then invariably the conversation turns to "how's it going at home, at work." You have to think about the student bringing their whole selves. These are people with real pressures at home. It was this humanizing moment for me that for the next two years, I got myself into the queue to work on help tickets. Understanding the customer and interacting with the customer—AI is not doing that, and maybe it will someday, who knows?
Elliot Felix: Yeah, it just makes a ton of sense. I interviewed so many people for The Connected College and one of the recurring themes from leaders was: "How do you stay close to the students?" Because the more you do your job, the more it takes you away from students. You're in meetings, you're with donors, you're with the board. The higher up you go, the less time you have with the people you're trying to help. You have to be intentional—whether it's the help desk, living in a residence hall, or teaching a class—to understand the student, staff, and faculty as people along their journey.
Jeremy Anderson: Yeah, I agree completely.
Elliot Felix: Well, Jeremy, thank you so much for a great conversation about how institutions combine, consolidate, partner, merge, and acquire, and the role that can play in supporting students and helping them be successful. Not falling through the gap between two institutions, but making the connections and mapping the processes.
Jeremy Anderson: I'm glad to share.
Elliot Felix: Thanks for listening to the Connected College podcast. Go to Elliotfelix.com for more information about my book, The Connected College, articles I've written and talks I've given. Please support the podcast by rating it and reviewing it wherever you're listening. Let's create connected colleges where all students succeed.