Dive Brief:
- In a new paper released Thursday morning, the American Council on Education lays out the case for higher ed executives to "prioritize the creation of a campus-wide analytics culture focused on the use of data to promote equity and inclusion, improve student outcomes, develop more inclusive environments, and create more holistic resource strategies."
- Developed from a series of meetings with over 40 higher ed leaders who shared their challenges with leveraging data, the paper identifies the "structural, cultural and technical obstacles" inhibiting higher ed leaders from becoming "data-enabled executives" who prioritize a culture of data analysis that helps move the needle for students and the campus overall.
- A lack of technical and human infrastructure is usually the biggest hindrance to institutions' ability to really leverage data in meaningful ways to affect campus culture. Governance, a lack of a business intelligence strategy, inconsistent metadata and data definitions, and poor data integration are also issues.
Dive Insight:
The University of South Florida was named the Education Dive 2017 Institution of the Year because of the institution's success with leveraging data to inform decisions and move the needle on student outcomes. Not only did such a micro-level examination of data allow the institution to make decisions for individual students, repeating that approach over and over actually helped USF close the achievement gap and see greater equity in their graduation rates. In fact, students of color are now out-performing their white peers at the institution.
Having a strong data infrastructure — and a culture on campus which is fully bought into the importance of allocating resources to establish and maintain it — has far-reaching effects on campus beyond just equity concerns. But overcoming challenges with data integration is a an important first step, as USF leaders learned earlier in the year. When Hurricane Irma hit, the data infrastructure the university already had in place allowed them to quickly assess and respond to the needs of students and faculty.
“We already had building blocks in place, from authentication to who students were, who faculty were, so we were able to pull those building blocks together very very quickly to build something that worked well,” said Sidney Fernandes, Vice President IT and CIO for the USF System, in an earlier interview with Education Dive. Fernandes emphasized the importance of having a critical pool of data from systems which to pull before an emergency hits.
If they’d had to start from scratch, said Fernandes, it would have been incredibly difficult to service the students and faculty members efficiently. But having integration between systems on the front end, with single sign-on and the infrastructure in place on the front end helped ensure “we didn’t have to worry about — ‘hey is this secure enough?’ … We were able to build groups based on what we’d already built.”