Education Research That Compounds
Get research-quality insights from students, parents, faculty, and administrators in 72 hours. Run 30+ minute AI-moderated interviews that go 5-7 levels deep into motivation, satisfaction, and decision-making. Build a cumulative understanding of your learners that compounds with every enrollment study, retention interview, and program evaluation.
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What User Intuition Does for Education Teams
User Intuition is an AI research platform for education institutions and EdTech companies that runs research-quality interviews to understand why students enroll, persist, disengage, or drop out. It delivers enrollment insights, program feedback, and learner experience research in under 72 hours, building a longitudinal Intelligence Hub that makes every study smarter than the last.
Why are admitted students choosing competitors over us?
Run interviews with admitted-but-declined students within days of decision deadlines. Surface whether the deciding factors are financial aid packaging, campus culture perception, program reputation, location, or career outcome expectations. Patterns emerge before the next admissions cycle begins.
What's actually causing students to leave after year one?
Pulse interviews with students who transferred or stopped out surface whether the problem is academic fit, social belonging, financial stress, advising gaps, or unmet expectations set during recruitment. Go 5-7 levels deep to separate symptoms from root causes.
Which EdTech features drive adoption vs. which get ignored?
Interview instructors and students who adopted your platform alongside those who abandoned it. Uncover whether barriers are UX friction, lack of training, misalignment with pedagogy, or missing integrations with existing LMS workflows.
Why Education Research Breaks at Decision Speed
Education leaders face a compounding problem: enrollment dynamics shift faster than institutional research cycles can respond, student expectations evolve with each cohort, and the stakes of getting it wrong are measured in years of lost tuition, reputation damage, and student outcomes. Most education research either arrives too late or captures only surface-level satisfaction scores.
Enrollment Decisions Happen Faster Than Research Cycles
Prospective students compare 5-8 institutions simultaneously. By the time a traditional focus group is recruited and analyzed, the yield window has closed. You need to understand decision drivers now, not after the cohort has committed elsewhere.
Satisfaction Surveys Miss the Why Behind Attrition
End-of-term surveys capture satisfaction scores but can't explain why a 3.8 GPA student transferred. The difference between 'somewhat satisfied' and 'stayed' lives in emotional and social factors that surveys can't reach. Without depth, retention interventions target symptoms, not causes.
Program Design Decisions Lack Learner Evidence
New programs launch based on market demand projections and faculty expertise, not on deep conversations with prospective learners about what they actually need. Curriculum committees debate without hearing from the students who would enroll.
Institutional Knowledge Disappears With Staff Turnover
An enrollment VP who understood why transfer students choose your institution leaves. Their successor starts from scratch. Research from three years ago lives in a PDF no one can find. Each leadership transition resets institutional understanding to zero.
EdTech Adoption Research Is Disconnected From Pedagogy
Product teams build features based on usage data, but can't explain why faculty resist adoption or why students use workarounds. The gap between what analytics show and what users actually experience costs millions in failed implementations.
Accreditation Evidence Requires Depth You Don't Have
Accreditors increasingly want evidence of continuous improvement grounded in stakeholder feedback. Satisfaction surveys show numbers. They don't show the qualitative depth that demonstrates you understand and respond to student, faculty, and employer needs.
Measurable impact
What matters most to teams after switching to AI-moderated research.
Compress from semester-long research cycles to 72 hours. Enrollment strategy, retention interventions, and program design decisions happen while they can still impact the current cohort.
30+ minute interviews with 5-7 levels of laddering surface the real reasons behind enrollment, persistence, and attrition. Move from 'students are dissatisfied' to 'students feel academically capable but socially disconnected after week six.'
Every interview across enrollment, retention, program evaluation, and alumni studies lives in a searchable Intelligence Hub. Cross-reference findings across cohorts, programs, and years.
Every finding traces back to real verbatim quotes from real stakeholders. Accreditation self-studies and continuous improvement reports backed by qualitative depth, not just survey averages.
How Education Teams Use User Intuition
Enrollment Yield & Melt Analysis
Interview admitted-but-declined and deposited-but-melted students within days of decision deadlines. Uncover whether financial aid, campus visits, peer influence, career outcomes, or competitor messaging drove their decision.
Student Retention & Stop-Out Research
Pulse interviews with students who transferred, stopped out, or are at risk of leaving. Surface whether the root cause is academic fit, social belonging, financial stress, advising gaps, or expectation mismatch.
Program Design & Curriculum Validation
Interview prospective students, current learners, alumni, and employers before committing to new programs or curriculum redesigns. Validate whether proposed changes align with actual learner needs and career outcomes.
EdTech Product-Market Fit & Adoption
Understand why faculty adopt or resist your platform. Interview instructors, students, and IT administrators to surface UX friction, pedagogical misalignment, integration gaps, and training needs.
Alumni & Employer Outcome Research
Interview alumni and hiring managers to understand how well programs prepare graduates for career success. Map perception gaps between what institutions deliver and what employers need.
Student Experience & Campus Life Research
Go beyond satisfaction surveys to understand the emotional and social dimensions of the student experience. Surface belonging, mental health support perceptions, housing satisfaction, and dining quality drivers.
Get started in minutes
Design Your Research
Define your research question and target audience. Reach students, parents, faculty, alumni, employers, or prospective learners through your own lists or User Intuition's 4M+ panel across 50+ languages.
AI Conducts Interviews
AI moderates 30+ minute interviews with 5-7 levels of laddering. Interviews happen in parallel, 24/7, on any device. By day two, transcripts stream in. By day three, patterns emerge across your respondent pool.
Search and Act
Findings land in your Intelligence Hub, searchable by theme, cohort, program, and respondent type. Cross-reference enrollment research with retention findings. Build institutional memory that survives staff turnover.
Built for speed and depth
Speed That Matches Decision Cycles
72-hour turnaround means enrollment insights arrive before yield deadlines, retention interventions deploy mid-semester, and program design decisions happen before catalog lock. Traditional education research takes months.
Depth Beyond Satisfaction Surveys
30+ minute interviews with AI-guided laddering uncover the emotional, social, and financial drivers hiding beneath surface-level satisfaction scores. Understand why a student with a 3.8 GPA and high satisfaction still transferred.
Institutional Memory That Persists
Every interview is searchable, taggable, and cross-referenceable in the Intelligence Hub. When a new dean needs to understand why nursing enrollment declined three years ago, they search and find the original student interviews.
Flexible Participant Sourcing
Interview your own students, prospective applicants, parents, alumni, and employers from your CRM lists. Or recruit from User Intuition's 4M+ panel for independent validation, competitive research, or hard-to-reach segments.
When Alternatives Still Make Sense
If you need institution-wide quantitative benchmarking or multi-year longitudinal cohort tracking with statistical modeling, complement with survey platforms or IR tools. For understanding the why behind enrollment, retention, and experience, User Intuition delivers faster and deeper.
How it compares
- Focus groups: $8K-$25K per study, 6-8 weeks, 8-12 participants. Limited depth, geographic constraints
- End-of-term surveys: fast but shallow, response fatigue, can't explain why students leave
- IR dashboards: show what happened, not why. Lagging indicators without qualitative context
- User Intuition: 72 hours, 5-7 levels deep, searchable Intelligence Hub that compounds across cohorts and years
"We interviewed 40 admitted students who chose competitors. Within a week, we understood exactly why our yield dropped. The patterns were clear: it wasn't financial aid amounts, it was how and when we communicated them. We restructured our award letters and recovered 6 points of yield the next cycle."
VP of Enrollment Management — Regional University
When AI Helps and When a Human Should Lead Education Research
AI-moderated interviews deliver consistent depth across education contexts, but some research questions benefit from human facilitation.
AI-Moderated Interviews Excel At
- Enrollment decision and yield research at scale
- Student retention and stop-out root-cause analysis
- Program evaluation and curriculum feedback
- EdTech adoption and UX research with faculty and students
- Alumni career outcome and employer satisfaction research
- Multilingual research across international student populations
Consider Human Moderation For
- Sensitive topics requiring trauma-informed facilitation
- Research with minors under 18 requiring guardian protocols
- Participatory design workshops for campus planning
- Executive-level interviews with board members or donors
- Ethnographic classroom observation research
- Deep cultural context research with underrepresented populations
Methodology refined through Fortune 500 consulting engagements and adapted for education contexts.
Run your first education research study this week
Whether you're diagnosing enrollment yield, understanding student attrition, or validating a new program, get research-quality answers in 72 hours.
Launch your first study in minutes. Define your question, target your audience, and see results in 72 hours.
No sales deck. We'll map User Intuition to your next enrollment challenge, retention question, or program decision.
See what education research looks like inside the Intelligence Hub. Real example, anonymized data.
No contract · Per-interview pricing · Results in 72 hours