As the competition for student enrollment has increased over the past several years, the pressure on the enrollment manager has increased proportionally. Managing enrollment expectations for institutional stakeholders requires effective communication, leadership, and the sharing of data with effective context. This article provides guidance on how…

This article describes the step-by-step process of how data science, marketing and communications, and higher education improved access and success for students. Over the last three years, strategic planning efforts helped develop a data-informed culture on campus. The work described within the playbook required time, energy, and a lot of…

Each year hundreds of institutions will administer national surveys to measure the engagement of their students. However, stakeholders on college campuses, such as educators (faculty, instructors, student affairs educators, and disability services administrators) and institutional research staff who work with this information are often unaware of…

This article describes a project undertaken as part of a cross-campus strategic planning effort. The project documented current campus practices and systems in use for collecting, analyzing and reporting key research metrics. The project identified organizational issues around siloed data collection and lack of clarity on data stewards, data…

Purpose: The analysis of data collected from user interactions with educational and information technology has attracted much attention as a promising approach to advancing our understanding of the learning process. This promise motivated the emergence of the field of learning analytics and supported the education sector in moving toward…

Bay Path University in Massachusetts developed a COVID dashboard and related safety practices enabled by data (Anderson, 2020) during the pandemic. The dashboard has capabilities, in which information technology staff partnered with executive management, human resources staff, health offices, and others to identify key performance indicators…

In this article Philip Henry, now in semi-retirement, reflects on the last 50 years of his career in United Kingdom higher education and the changes that ensued during this time. Over the span of his career he had the opportunity to experience a wide range of institutions in all of the U.K. university mission groups and in a range of positions…

Postgraduate education is poised for rapid development and if Deans and administrators will embrace lessons from industry it can actually be a smooth transition. The cost of doing nothing is greater than it has ever been before. Hit and miss development has left Postgraduate Schools (PGS) with disjointed student analytics and student experience is…

Administrators at many colleges and universities have had online courses at their institutions for many years, now. One of the hidden challenges about online courses is that they tend to be observed and evaluated far less frequently than their face-to-face course counterparts. This is party due to the fact that many of us administrators today…

Lorain County Community College (LCCC) was designed for access, however, not necessarily completion. The college was unprepared for students who wanted to earn a degree but then often didn't make it to graduation. In 2011, LCCC retained fewer than six in ten students. Its three-year graduation rate was 8 percent. For African American students, it…

Tarrant County College's Achieving the Dream transformation has not only changed the college but all who engaged in the initiative. In four years, through ATD TCC became a college with one purpose, one goal, and one focus--student success through data informed decision making. From TCC Chancellor Dr. Erma Johnson Hadley to campus administrators,…

For years, faculty members have pointed to the sluggish growth in the number of tenured professors and complained that university payrolls are filled with too many administrators. This, they maintain, adds unnecessary costs and takes the focus away from teaching and learning. But whether such "administrative bloat" is really occurring and how much…

Most universities use Information Systems (IS) to perform their daily administrative activities (student enrollment, data files, accountancy, etc.), and an integrated Learning Management System (LMS) to support teaching and learning. However, although a lot of effort has been put into deploying these computerized systems, the data that they…

Data-driven decision making, popularized in the 1980s and 1990s, is evolving into a vastly more sophisticated concept known as big data that relies on software approaches generally referred to as analytics. Big data and analytics for instructional applications are in their infancy and will take a few years to mature, although their presence is…

Recent leadership failures at a couple of major public universities suggest that we should revisit the question of how colleges and universities should be governed. This article presents the authors' views on the leadership roles of trustees, presidents, and faculty. They describe how those roles can be effectively played and point out some of the…