The Mission

The Education Data Collective (EDC) connects schools, networks, and districts to data with local trends and competitive insights for smarter, sustainable planning. Their tools help education leaders explore key trends, forecasts, and risk profiles to make smarter, informed decisions tailored to each institution’s needs.

The Situation

Schools and districts across the country are navigating complex external forces that directly shape enrollment and long-term sustainability. Shifts in population and declining student populations are altering the landscape, while competitive dynamics between schools add additional pressure. 

Faced with these challenges, a large, national K–12 education foundation relies on EDC’s School Explorer tool to access market trends, enrollment forecasts, and competitive insights in order to guide strategic decisions for its portfolio.

In order to better understand these external forces and how they might add context to internal school data, the Foundation partnered with the Education Data Collective to conduct an in-depth analysis. Impactful Insights collaborated with EDC to design and deliver the work, combining robust data analysis with clear, actionable insights that would help the Foundation anticipate risk, highlight opportunities, and support smarter planning across its portfolio.

Solutions Delivered

• First, Impactful Insights partnered with the Education Data Collective to design and deliver a comprehensive analysis of external forces across multiple geographic levels (national, state, and metro area) and portfolio lenses (school network, grade span, and school tenure). This included detailed analyses of enrollment and demographic metrics such as school and area enrollment trends, population shifts and projections, and market share.
  

• Next, we surfaced actionable insights by developing school-level risk scores and identifying school “personas” that reflected performance in context of external conditions - for example, highlighting positive outliers that were able to maintain or grow enrollment despite declining student populations.
  

• Finally, we delivered a full set of outputs tailored for different audiences: an analytical presentation including an executive summary of key findings, as well as flexible comprehensive spreadsheets for hands-on analysis. These resources enabled the Foundation to better understand external factors and identify strategies for sustainable enrollment in a shifting demographic landscape.