The Importance of Being Driven – By Data: Part Three

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Dr. Susan Coia Gailey
Founder
Data-based Institutional Research, Assessment & Reporting Systems

Continued from The Importance of Being Driven – By Data: Part Two

Based on years of data history, you develop data-based tactics to market to students with Best Fit characteristics, i.e., student profiles that are associated with graduation. You might leverage financial aid to enroll them and retain them. You assess your student services as well as?curricula, programs, courses, faculty and instruction. Methods of assessment might include a student satisfaction survey and course evaluations of learning outcomes and instructional delivery from your curricula, program and course review initiatives. These data bases are part of your Data Library. They must be managed so data can be analyzed and reported for utilization.

You follow this model for every one of the goals in your strategic plan.

1. Determine the desired outcome of each strategic goal and convert it to a metric or a set of metrics (i.e., multiple measures). Metrics are ?observables?, i.e., how success should look for each strategic goal.

2. Research guides you on how to impact each goal. When you understand the dynamics between predictors and outcomes, you can control your outcomes or at least manage them.

3. You assess and report progress along the way through benchmarks from baseline through target. You can drill down further to assess and report the efficacy of particular tactics, such as those for admissions marketing and those for instruction, which fuel your strategic plan.

This is a data-based institutional research, assessment and reporting system. In fact, data-based research also will tell you whether your strategic goals square with reality: Research informs strategic direction. Eventually you build a comprehensive and cohesive databased body of knowledge so you will know how a prospective change of strategy, policy or tactic will impact others without learning the hard way and senior management will be on the same page. Higher education has no shortage of people with opinions. Data settles debates that generate opposition and stalemates.

Does this sound easy? Given that data is the basis for research, assessment and reporting, you must, first and foremost, have the data. Asking for data-based research, assessments and reports without data is like putting Emeril in a kitchen with no food to make dinner. What?s more, you need the right data elements archived at a point in time in which they capture the information you need; data elements must be formatted in a data file layout that lends itself to analysis. Take our metaphor a step further: Emeril cannot make chicken parmesan without chicken. If there is no chicken, Emeril must either go to the store to buy one or become a farmer. This delays dinner. You might figure that you need a ?data warehouse.? Picture what it would be like to deal with merchandise in a disorganized Wal-Mart warehouse. So, too, data warehouses must be organized. Think of your data warehouse as a carefully cataloged Data Library. You lay out a data file that lends itself to the statistical analyses and reports that give you the information you need.

Let?s go back to our Fact Book table with four-, five- and six-year graduation rates by admission year. You should be able to make an ad hoc request for three years of five-year graduation rates of Hispanic female Pell-recipients and receive the figures in minutes for a major donor. (If you want to raise the graduation rate you can request research on how to do so). When data files in data warehouses are not organized to provide such information, your people must generate lists and do manual counts and that is if the data were archived. Your various offices keep data they need to run their respective operations. However, they also must keep data for research to inform strategic direction, planning, policy and decision-making and do so in a proscribed way. Again, data-based institutional research, assessment and reporting is an integrated system.

All operations must step up to the plate to cooperate with the coordinating office which the president and the provost must actively support. Have you been ?living with? inaccurate enrollment and financial aid forecasts that throw off department budgets, classes (e.g., sections, sizes, and faculty), housing and more? This is symptomatic of substandard data collection, data management and/or analysis. Do you get a different figure every time you ask a particular question? Do different figures appear on various reports? Do figures vary, depending on whom you ask? Lack of consistency is another symptom of poor data management and analysis, including unstandardized methodologies for collecting, entering, analyzing and reporting data. Rigor in data management applies to every functional area of your institution ? Finance, Human Resources, External Affairs, Facilities Management/Physical Plant, Student Affairs, Admissions, Financial Aid, Registrar, Advancement/Alumni, Career Development/Placement and Academic Affairs. All areas of the institution are active participants.

Every functional area of your institution can have a mission, which is aligned with your institutional mission, core values and strategic plan and be accountable for fulfilling that mission. The missions can be translated into sets of deliverables and metrics so that fulfillment of the local mission is assessed and reported. Your Office of Institutional Research, Assessment & Reporting is at the helm for business protocol, providing centralized expertise and coordination for what data elements to collect, time of data capture, how to code data elements for manipulation and reporting and how to lay them out in a data file format for access and intended use. Information Technology (IT) is critical in providing technical expertise and service. For example, IT may help determine a central data repository for institutional data and provide data transport and programming expertise. Local data managers are the business area data experts that provide information to the Office of Institutional Research, Assessment & Reporting about the meaning?of data that are collected in their respective operations. This is teamwork. Teams follow the business protocol. When local offices are not responsible for simple reporting, they are not motivated to appropriately manage data that are generated in their respective operations so that the data can be archived in a central repository for research, assessment and reporting by anyone.

Subsets of data that are generated in the operations of your various functional areas have research, assessment and reporting value. In a distributed system your offices have Data Managers who extract subsets of data elements from your main system, or their separate systems, ?at census? (i.e., calendar date or event driven), and in a data file layout that lends itself to the kind of research, assessment and reporting that you need. This business practice also enables local offices to plan data-based tactics, track them in progress to make any adjustments and assess their effectiveness for the future. An Admissions example is College Board search. A Financial Aid office example is scholarships and loan amounts. Their tactics have been better?informed by the Office of Institutional Research which identifies important applicant attributes and awarding parameters for them.

Do you turn over your admissions marketing and financial aid awarding strategies to an outside enrollment management consultant, and figure that you?ve got this covered? Consider this:

A data-based, versus opinion-based, enrollment management consultant for admissions marketing and financial aid awarding strategies still needs data to work with.

Consultants can only work with the data you turn over to them.

How time consuming and tedious is it for your offices to compile the data for your consultant and can you be sure that it is accurate (i.e., data integrity)?

The consulting practice does what you contracted it to do. How self-reliant are you to cover what it does not?

How equipped are you for data-based institutional research, assessment and reporting to inform strategic direction for your institution and strategic planning, policy and decision-making for every need in every facet of your institution?

Cost of education, loans amounts, merit-based versus need-based aid, loan default rates, graduation rates, learning outcomes, starting salaries and employment in one?s major:

Figures are becoming public knowledge due to the accessibility and sophisticated use of data bases by mainstream media for writing provocative articles. Do you struggle with reporting these pertinent factors of interest? Moreover are you proactive in impacting them? Driven by the proper use of data you can be proactive, instead of reactive, in the face of increasing accountability to constituents and increasing demands on your institution. A distributed network of institution-wide participants which is guided by a central office and supported by the president and provost enables a data-based institutional research, assessment and reporting system that gives rise to an evidence-based culture for strategic planning, policy and decision-making.


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