In the case of higher education, the hills are more like mountains of data that "we're accumulating at a ferocious rate," according to Gerry McCartney, CIO of Purdue University (Indiana). "Every higher education institution has this data, but it just sits there like gold in the ground," complains McCartney. Big Data and the new tools people are seeing now are about mining that gold. It is about extracting real value from the data. While the quest to extract this value may not resemble the original 49er gold rush yet, many institutions have at last decided to stake a claim. Some are evaluating third-party Big Data systems; others are testing new environments for cross-institutional predictive analytics; and a few are developing their own in-house tools. In this second installment of a two-part series, the author examines how pioneering schools--either alone or in consortia--are mining Big Data in hopes of uncovering the ultimate riches: improved student learning and performance. [For the first installment of this series, see EJ991738.]