This article explores utilizing a post-graduation success lens to help community college leaders frame the challenges of achieving equitable improvement for their students. Specifically, it posits that providing and exploring customized labor market data presented in an accessible format can help institutional leaders provide a "true…

This study has three primary objectives. First to provide insight into possibilities for moderation/mediation analysis in education research by discussing analytical methods based on the counterfactual and developed in other disciplines. Second is to highlight specific issues related to mediation and the estimation of effects when the outcome is…

A commonly used metric for measuring college costs, drawn from data in the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), is expenditure per full-time equivalent (FTE) student. This article discusses an error in this per FTE calculation when using IPEDS data, especially with regard to community colleges. The problem is that expenditures…

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…

In 2019, Nebraska Indian Community College (NICC) joined the National Student Clearinghouse Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP). This technical brief will discuss an approach to prepare Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP) data collections that consist of the development of both term cohort files and course files. The process utilized course and…

In the fall of 2019, Nebraska Indian Community College [NICC] became the first tribal college to participate in a new data service of the National Student Clearinghouse called the Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP). A small college with high aspirations for its students, NICC was in the process of building data capacity and adopting data-driven…

The Community College Academic and Student Support Ecosystems (CCASSE) project examines how academic and student support services at not-for-profit associate-degree granting colleges are organized, funded, and staffed, and how these services can most effectively advance student success. In spring 2019, Ithaka S+R surveyed 249 chief academic and…