Predictive analytics and the creation of the permanent present

ABSTRACT

This article examines the work of predictive analytics in shaping the social worlds in which they thrive, and in particular the world of the first year of Great State University’s student success initiative. Specifically, this article investigates the following research paradox: predictive analytics, as driven by a logic premised on predicting the future, lock Great State University into a never-ending present. Through Brian Massumi’s concept of a logic of preemption, this paper explores how a quest for proper predictive analytics locked this student success initiative into a hamster wheel of a never-ending present, where the only space and time of action was here and now. It is argued that the function of predictive analytics in higher education is to produce space and time through dividuation and continuous algorithmic variation, freezing both past and future and restricting spacetimes of change to the present.

KEYWORDS:

• Predictive analytics
• preemption
• student success
• higher education
• college impact

Acknowledgements

Parts of this paper are adapted from my dissertation as well as a talk given at Florida International University in April 2019. My thanks to Dan Saunders, Ben Baez, and the students and faculty of FIU for the invitation and rich conversations. Thanks also to Paul Eaton and Maureen Flint for their insight on previous versions of this draft, as well as to the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A pseudonym.

2 EAB is the company formerly known as the Educational Advisory Board. The acronym now stands for nothing. EAB Navigate is the next generation of the platform in use at GSU and described in the findings, EAB’s SSC Campus.

3 The work of affect, Massumi’s (2015) virtual cause, appears here typically through mentions of the anxiety that control produces. A direct exploration of the work of affect is outside the scope of this paper. For more on the work of affect within preemptive student success movements, see Smithers 2020.

4 A note on the stylization of GSU data: direct quotes from participants are marked with quotation marks. Direct quotes from contemporaneous field notes are italicized. When I paraphrase the discussion recorded, I set that off using sideways carets. Paraphrasings for identifiable items are non-italicized, and when substituting are also in brackets. I substitute singular gendered pronouns with they. Line breaks denote speaker changes. I neither name speakers nor note consistent persons speaking within conversations in order to direct attention to the social world that makes such speech possible rather than the individualized persons produced from this world.

5 See The X-Files (Carter et al. 1998) and ‘When Keepin’ it Real Goes Wrong,’ (Brennan & Chappelle, 2004).

6 GSU was one of many campuses using Finish in 4 to both frame and market their student success initiative.