Dive Brief:
- The Gates Foundation and the Institute for Higher Education Policy have come together to develop a field-based metrics framework to improve national higher education data and include nontraditional students.
- The framework focuses on performance, efficiency, and equity across five domains: access, progression, completion, cost, and post-college outcomes — and the Gates Foundation hopes all colleges will one day be expected to report this data into a national database.
- While many colleges already collect much of this data on their own, students and surveys show higher ed leaders want to improve their data collection and analysis — and eCampus News reports that the idea of new federal requirements can be intimidating, given a culture of blame in education that has focused on failing schools rather than paths to improvement.
Dive Insight:
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, most college students today are nontraditional. Yet much of the national data collection ignores them. It does not follow transfer students; it does not capture students who do not get federal financial aid. The Gates Foundation highlights how individual institutions and some states are collecting more holistic information about students in its latest paper, “Answering the Call: Institutions and States Lead the Way Toward Better Measures of Postsecondary Performance.”
The foundation has convened a working group and plans to publish a series of papers with recommendations for improving the institutional, state, and national data infrastructure in higher education and creating better opportunities for comparative analysis. Those papers are expected this spring.