Private Institutions
At a tuition-dependent institution, every question is a revenue question
Retention indicators in front of the faculty member who can act, the outcomes case published where admissions can point to it, and the prospect list on the officer's desk Monday. All from the data already in your systems, whatever the size of the IT team.
Trusted by private colleges and universities, from liberal arts colleges to doctoral universities
The situation
The strategy is decided. The numbers to run it on are not.
In NACUBO's Tuition Discounting Study, retention is the strategy private institutions cite most often for growing net tuition revenue. The difficulty is getting the numbers that strategy depends on, on time, from data spread across the ERP.
01
Discounting stopped working as a growth lever
NACUBO's Tuition Discounting Study puts the rate for first-time undergraduates at 57.1 percent, its highest in a decade, while net tuition revenue per student fell. More given away, less netted, and the board wants to know which part of the discount is buying persistence.
02
The indicators are in four places and nobody assembles them mid-term
Midterm grades, attendance, engagement, and aid status each sit in a different module, and each one gets looked at when its office gets to it. Nobody puts them side by side for one student until the end of the term, and by then the student has decided.
03
The gift officer's prospect list is a report request, and the campaign does not wait
Engagement and giving are both in the advancement module. Getting them out as a ranked list, by class year and by fund, is a ticket to the same two people who run everything else, and the officer is on the road before it comes back.
04
The board packet takes weeks to build
Enrollment, retention, and budget figures come from three offices and get compiled by hand before each meeting. Any chance to dig deeper is limited to what was prepared.
Retention
Indicators in front of the faculty member who can act on them
At a private institution, the retention program is the faculty and the advisors, and the promise to the family is that somebody will notice. Argos puts the indicators where those people already are: grades, attendance, aid status, and engagement in one list, delivered before the semester is lost.
Your team builds the view once and decides who can run it. Faculty, advisors, and success coaches open what they have been granted, without an ERP login and without anyone in IR pulling it for them.
- Early indicators combining grades, attendance, aid status, and engagement in one view
- Views built for advisors, chairs, and coaches, each permissioned to the people in that role
- Scheduled delivery, so the list arrives on the morning the advisor needs it instead of after a request
- Unlimited users under the institutional license, with no ERP seat or login required
- Dashboard Designer builds and shares retention dashboards from the browser, readable on a phone
“It returns time to our staff and improves the accuracy and customization of communications with our constituents.”
Colin Hilton-MacFarlane · AVP for Institutional Research and Effectiveness · Stetson University
Argos X
The board packet, built once and opened live in the meeting
Enrollment, retention, and budget figures come from three offices, and somebody compiles them by hand before every meeting. When a trustee asks the question the packet did not anticipate, the answer waits for the next one.
Argos X puts the packet in a browser. Dashboard Designer publishes the enrollment, retention, and budget views as one dashboard the president's office opens in the room. When a trustee asks the follow-up, Pivot Mode and Explore Data reshape the result on the spot, and Argos Data Agent answers a plain-language question against the same governed data with the SQL shown.
- Dashboard Designer builds and publishes the board, enrollment, and retention dashboards from the browser, readable on a phone
- Pivot Mode and Explore Data for reshaping and exporting a result without a new report request
- Argos Data Agent for the plain-language follow-up, with the SQL visible
- Everything on the same governed objects and permissions your team already set
- Dashboard Designer, Explore Data, and Pivot Mode are included with Argos at no additional cost
- Argos Data Agent is licensed separately, in Core and Advanced tiers
“It has given us the ability to put this data into easy-to-read dashboards which are utilized by our Board of Trustee Members and the La Salle Community.”
Lisa Willie · Executive Coordinator, Enrollment Services · La Salle University
Net revenue
Which aid strategies produce students who stay
Headline enrollment is the easy number and the least useful one. What defends a budget is which aid bands, programs, and channels produce students who enroll, persist, and graduate. Argos reads the admissions, aid, and enrollment modules in your ERP on one set of definitions, so that becomes a standing report instead of a spreadsheet somebody reconciles every month.
The discount rate stops being one number and becomes a question you can answer: which part of it is buying persistence, and which part is buying a deposit that leaves in May.
- Net tuition revenue by cohort, program, and aid band, with discount rate beside it
- Yield and persistence traced back to recruitment channel and aid strategy
- Cohort definitions saved once and run the same way in a future year
- Delivered to the enrollment management group on a schedule, not assembled the week before the meeting
- On Banner and Colleague, FormFusion produces the award letter itself, with the fields the baseline template cannot carry
“We do not have to do these manual processes anymore.”
Heidelberg University · Enrollment and Financial Aid · Heidelberg University
Advancement
The prospect list arrives on Monday, and the officer did not have to ask for it
Your advancement module already holds giving and engagement together: the gifts, the event attendance, the volunteer roles, the reunion committee seats. What it does not do is hand a gift officer a ranked list by class year and fund on the morning they need it, without a ticket to the two people who run everything else.
Your team builds that list once, on definitions advancement sets, and schedules it. The officer gets it on the road. Campaign progress reaches the vice president on the same schedule, and the number matches what the board sees.
- Prospect lists ranked on engagement and giving together, on definitions your advancement team sets
- Delivered to gift officers on a schedule, built once by your team
- Campaign progress against goal, by fund and by class year, current as of this morning
- Pledge reminders, receipts, and stewardship reports produced and delivered without a mail merge
“Argos helps me keep the pulse of my many volunteer groups. It allows me to search on just about any question I have as I deal with over 1,000 volunteers.”
Jessi Schimmel · Associate Director, Alumni Association · Lehigh University
If your whole IT department fits in one room
The reporting office is one person, and that person has another job
At a college of around a thousand students, the person who writes the queries is also the person who runs the ERP, answers the help desk, and chairs the faculty technology committee. Every report request competes with all of that, and so their queue never clears.
Argos was built for that ratio. One person builds the governed objects. Everyone else runs them, filters them, schedules them, and exports them without touching SQL or holding an ERP login. The queue does not get shorter because the person got faster. It gets shorter because most of it stops being a request.
- One report writer serving the whole campus, with the permissions set once
- Advisors, chairs, coaches, and the bursar getting their own answers, without a database credential
- The retention list, the board packet, and the aid exception report all on a schedule, none of them requested
- The same license covering the small applications a larger institution would buy: event check-in, equipment lending, prospect finders, advisor caseload views
- Free on-demand training in the Evisions Community, so the second person your team hires can learn it without a course
A head start, not a blank page
You do not start from nothing
A private institution rarely has a year to build a reporting library before anyone sees value. Three things shorten that considerably.
- The CO-OP library and the Banner and Colleague Starter Packs, included with the license
- Professional Services for the first build, a conversion, or a migration, quoted against a defined scope
- Free on-demand training in the Evisions Community, and multi-day courses when a team needs them
Retention and net revenue, answered from one source
The questions private institutions ask first, run on the data already in your ERP, with CO-OP and Starter Pack objects to start from. See it in a demo.
In their words
Private institutions, on what stopped waiting
Private colleges and universities running Argos or FormFusion in production, from a two-thousand-student liberal arts college to a research university.
“
We've been using Argos basically as our glue.
Earlham College
IT and Enterprise Reporting
A liberal arts college running student, advancement, and engagement reporting on one governed layer, built by a small team.
“
When there's a question about the data that needs to be answered, Argos is the tool that we go to.
Bard College
Institutional Technology
The default answer to a data question, instead of one option among several.
Outcome
Scheduling and delivery returned about 80 percent of the daily staff time the advancement team had spent producing reports, with 40 scheduled reports now emailed across campus each week.
Lehigh University
Advancement and Alumni Relations
Outcome
Award letters generated as PDFs and uploaded into Slate automatically, replacing an Excel-based manual process while the office was operating with reduced staff.
Heidelberg University
Enrollment and Financial Aid
Related
The same revenue question reaches four offices
Admissions and Recruitment
The admitted class from decision to first day, and the melt list before it is a melt number.
Financial Aid
Packaging, leveraging, and the award letter that closes the deposit.
Advancement
The prospect list on a schedule, and campaign progress the board can trust.
Student Success and Retention
Early indicators, outreach, and measuring whether any of it worked.
How it fits
Where this sits relative to what you already run
With your ERP
Your ERP stays the system of record for the student, the aid package, and the alumni record. Argos reads it directly through governed objects, so admissions, aid, enrollment, and advancement data are queryable together without a warehouse first.
With Ellucian Insights
Insights aggregates data across Ellucian products on a managed data layer. Argos works directly against your own environment, covering dashboards through Dashboard Designer, conversational analysis through Argos Data Agent, compliance output, and scheduled delivery, on definitions your team controls. Most institutions run both.
With the way it works today
The enrollment model lives in one spreadsheet, the retention indicators reach a report after the student has decided, and the trustee's follow-up costs a week. It reflects how the work is routed.
Trust and security
You take security seriously. So do we.
The Trust Center is published and the HECVAT is available on request, so a reviewer can start before anyone schedules a call.
Permissions are enforced, never overridden
A report cannot be opened by someone your team has not permissioned to run it. Student, aid, and donor views are built for the role that needs them and granted to that role.
Authentication
LDAP group sync and SAML SSO configured once at the MAPS layer, with permission tiers set per product in the same place, by the same team.
AI governance
Argos Data Agent is built on Argos and reads only the DataBlocks you enable, under the permissions already set there. Sensitive columns can be masked or redacted for everyone who uses it, and institutional data is not retained by Evisions or the model provider.
Production performance
Query queuing and priority keep reporting load from competing with registration and billing.
Data handling
FERPA-aligned practices, encryption in transit, and AES-encrypted password-protected document delivery. For Argos Data Agent, masking or redaction of sensitive fields.
Documentation
Trust Center, and a HECVAT (the standard higher education security questionnaire) on request.
Frequently asked questions
Questions we get asked first
We are not a small college. Does this apply to us?
Yes. Tuition dependence, retention, and the gift pipeline are the same problem at a 500-student college and at a research university with a large IT organization. What changes when the reporting office is one person is covered separately.
We are a small college. How much staff time does this take to run?
Your team builds objects once and the rest of the institution runs them. That ratio is the reason one report writer can serve a whole campus, and the CO-OP and Starter Packs mean the first objects are edited rather than written.
What is the CO-OP?
A community library where Argos institutions share the objects they have built. Every customer can take, adapt, and run what is there. Retention, IPEDS, aid reconciliation, and advancement views are all in it.
Are Starter Packs available for our ERP?
For Banner and Colleague, through the CO-OP community, and included with the license. Tell us what you run and we will say what is available for it.
Can we see retention risk indicators in time to act on them?
Yes. Reports run against your data source directly instead of an extract you maintain, and can be scheduled to the advisor or coach who owns the outreach.
Can we analyze net tuition revenue by aid band and cohort?
Yes. Argos sits above the ERP instead of inside the finance or aid module, so admissions, aid, and enrollment data are queryable together, with no warehouse first.
Can advancement build prospect lists from engagement, not just giving?
Yes, from your advancement module, which already holds both. Argos is not a fundraising system and does not replace it; it gets the ranked list to the officer on a schedule instead of on request.
What is included with Argos, and what is licensed separately?
Dashboard Designer, Explore Data, and Pivot Mode are included with Argos at no additional cost. Argos Data Agent is licensed separately, in Core and Advanced tiers.
What happens to student data when someone uses Data Agent?
Argos Data Agent operates under Zero Data Retention, honors existing permissions, and supports masking and redaction. It runs against governed objects instead of the raw database.
Do advisors and faculty need a Banner or Colleague login?
No. Licensing is per institution with unlimited users, and report access does not require an ERP seat.
What happens when we move to SaaS?
Argos runs on-premises and in SaaS. What carries over from your existing reporting depends on how it was built, and Professional Services scopes that against your own inventory before anyone commits to a date.
How long does implementation take?
It depends on how much you want live on day one, and on how much the CO-OP and a Starter Pack cover before anyone writes a query. Professional Services scopes it with you.
What does it cost, and can we talk to an institution like ours?
Licensing is per institution rather than per user, and price is driven by institution size and product mix rather than headcount, with nothing billed for people who only read reports. The one exception is Argos Data Agent Advanced, which is licensed per seat; Core is unlimited. Tell us your FTE and which products you are weighing and we will give you a real figure on the first call, then put you in touch with a private institution of roughly your size and ERP.
Next step
The answers a tuition-dependent institution needs first
Retention, net revenue by aid band, and advancement lists, run from one governed source whatever the size of the IT team. Get a demo.
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