Speculative reform jumps the gun on notions of data-driven reform, requiring administrators to anticipate and act to ensure problems (and the data that would show them) do not materialize. Speculative reforms are incapable of delivering the outcomes they promise, as they are fueled by a fear of the future that their reforms do not extinguish. In…

Student privacy is a critical area of higher education that deserves greater focus, particularly as student data digitalization increases. Many colleges and universities use data literacy as a way to prepare students, sometimes from different disciplines, to work with others' data postgraduation. Data literacy can be an avenue for helping all…

Complete College America (CCA) is partnered with the National Student Clearinghouse in promoting the latter's Postsecondary Data Partnership (PDP), a data and reporting tool for tracking student success metrics. The PDP is offered at nominal cost, built for democratized data access, and encompasses transfer data native to Clearinghouse products,…

In recent decades, education leaders and researchers have increasingly sought to disaggregate key higher education outcome data--graduation rates, attainment, employment, and income--by race and ethnicity in order to uncover and narrow equity gaps. The same is true, recently, for affordability, especially as it relates to the differential impact…

In this article, the authors report on a tested workload intervention, faculty work activity dashboards, to enhance transparency and reduce ambiguity. This intervention is part of the Faculty Workload and Rewards Project (FWRP), a National Science Foundation-funded, action-research project designed to improve equity in how faculty workload is…

Over the last two years, more data was created than in the entire previous history of humankind (IBM, 2016; Marr, 2016). Roughly 1.7 megabytes of new information will be created every second for every person on earth by the turn of the decade (Evans, 2011; Gantz & Reinsel, 2012; Marr, 2016). Data are created continuously and at a rate that is…

In recent years the fight for equity in higher education has intensified. Institutional leaders, advocates, and policymakers alike are seeking scalable solutions that rapidly close equity gaps among this nation's most underserved populations. Too many hardworking students still struggle to afford a college education, and historically underserved…

With national graduation rates that range from 32% among open enrollment institutions to 66% among private not-for-profits, higher education institutions have a moral imperative to improve the success of their students. Interventions to support today's students must consider the student holistically, be just-in-time, and come from a…

Equity is emerging as a new frontier in the student success movement. But it's not enough to tackle higher education's deep equity divides by looking only at markers such as persistence, transfer, course credits, and DWF grades. True equity accountability depends on clarity about the key components of a quality education, especially the kinds of…

The level of educational attainment in the United States is a central focus of public policy. The Obama administration, some states, large national foundations, and other organizations have set near-term goals to increase the number of Americans with college degrees. Achieving these goals is likely to involve a combination of increasing…

New technologies and data science are transforming a wide range of organizations into analytics-intensive enterprises. Despite the resulting demand for graduates with experience in the application of analytics, though, undergraduate education has been slow to change. The academic and policy communities have engaged in a decade-long conversation…

The newest student activist movement appears to be amplifying what some higher education practitioners have talked about for a long time: students of color have been granted access to an educational opportunity that was not as advertised, and the result is not good enough. Others are shining the spotlight on race, class, identity, and equity as…

Many institutions are trying to better understand the factors that drive student success and failure in order to improve the efficiency of degree production. Traditional academic reporting systems are not adequate for this purpose, since they are designed to measure outcomes, not to uncover the factors that influence them. To address this problem,…

Over the past decade, the federal investment in higher education has grown, the public demand for a postsecondary degree has risen, and skepticism about the value and meaning of the degree has increased. This confluence has prompted a more intense federal interest in having clear and comparable information about colleges and universities available…

Hundreds of thousands of current and former service members enter college each year, and their ranks are expected to swell as several major US military engagements overseas wind down. This article presents the following questions: (1) What is the overall success rate for student service members and veterans attending US colleges and universities;…