Case Study: Wichita State University achieves improved student retention and over 60% cost savings with IBM Cloud Pak for Data

From data to diplomas: helping at-risk students succeed

Wichita State University (WSU) processes more than 63 million student records daily to identify and support at‑risk students, but its legacy environment suffered from data silos, no unified metadata or lineage repository, and limited visibility for security and PII compliance. To modernize governance and analytics and protect sensitive research and student data, WSU turned to IBM Cloud Pak for Data.

WSU engaged IBM Business Partner Prolifics to deploy IBM Cloud Pak for Data along with IBM DataStage for IBM Cloud Pak, IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog and IBM API Connect to centralize data, move ETL processes, catalog assets and consolidate roughly 300 APIs. The IBM Cloud Pak for Data–based solution eliminated silos, improved data governance and PII reporting, enhanced predictive models for early student interventions and enrollment forecasting, and delivered more than 60% cost savings versus the previous solution.

Wichita State University

David Wright

Chief Data Officer