Problem
Every year, students drop out of university before they finish their degree. Some leave because of financial pressure. Some because of mental health struggles. Some because they simply fell behind and nobody noticed in time. The cost is real: for the student, who loses the qualification they worked for; and for the institution, which loses a person it could have helped. The challenge is that the warning signs are often there, buried in data that universities already hold, but nobody has built a reliable way to read them early enough to act.
Science
We run the Analytics for Society Awards, an annual student competition co-hosted by the Gandhi Centre for Inclusive Innovation at ³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ Business School, University College London (UCL) School of Management and the Institute of Analytics (IoA). The competition challenges student teams to use data analytics, the science of finding patterns and answers in large sets of information, to address real-world problems aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Teams of up to four students submit a five-minute video and a written proposal, then present to a panel of academic and industry judges at a final event. The 2025 winning team built a predictive analytics platform, a system that uses data to identify which students are most likely to drop out before they do.
Outcome
The 2025 winning team's platform identifies students who are at risk of leaving their course and enables universities to intervene early, with targeted support designed to improve retention and promote educational equity. The 2026 competition, which took place on 7 May 2026, offered a prize pool of £3,000 funded by the IoA. Past winners have addressed microplastic contamination in water bodies (2023) and extreme poverty through micro-credentials and career mapping (2024), showing the breadth of societal challenges that student data scientists are tackling through this programme.
Change
Universities and colleges hold more data about their students than they have ever had before. What they often lack is the analytical capacity to turn that data into early action. The Analytics for Society Awards shows that student data scientists can build exactly that capacity, and that the tools to prevent dropout already exist. Institutions that want to improve student retention should look at what this competition's winners have already built.