Key insights
- Colleges and universities collect data that can help improve recruiting, raise graduation rates, and more.
- Getting the right information in front of the right people can be difficult, but it's an important part of your data strategy.
- Dashboards give higher education leaders a rich information resource that can reference at will – a potent way to turn data into a resource for better decision making.
Explore how dashboards can help you make better decisions.
Few industries are better positioned to become “data-driven” than higher education. Colleges and universities collect huge amounts of data — starting when a student first applies and continuing long after they graduate — that can be put toward countless productive purposes, from improving recruiting to raising graduation rates. Across higher education, institutions have both the means and the motivation to make decisions based on data.
But most are not successful.
A recent Inside Higher Ed article referenced a survey of campus IT officers revealed that most (60%) consider data analytics to be “very important,” yet very few (22%) think their analytics efforts are “very effective.” College administrators agree; only 23% of respondents in the same survey rank their efforts at using data for decision making as “very effective.” Also telling: that figure has declined from 31% in 2012.
These responses paint a picture of higher education trying but struggling to turn mountains of valuable data into actionable insights. The answer, however, may be a lot simpler than it seems.
"Colleges and universities that have robust data governance and integrated dashboards have an advantage when it comes to decision making and ownership among stakeholders,” said Deirdre Hodgson, principal, higher education team at CLA. “With declining enrollment impacting many institutions and other industry disrupters, it is crucial for higher education to fully embrace using data in this way."
Where dealing with data gets really difficult
Collecting, storing, securing, and analyzing data are all huge undertakings. But the hardest part of any data strategy is always the final mile: getting the right information in front of the right people. Much can go wrong. And when it does, data has little to no value at all.
A few things stand between data and decision makers. Data silos, for one, keep important information trapped in disconnected locations, resulting in an incomplete or inconsistent understanding of what the data actually indicates. Manual processes are another major problem. Any effort to integrate, analyze, and distribute data by hand can get overwhelmed by the speed and scale of that data. Even when the analytics part works perfectly, supplying administrators with the information they need — when and where they actually need it — can be a final stumbling block.
All these issues have the same symptom: poor visibility. The people trying to decide how to improve outcomes for students, faculty, and the institution as a whole can’t “see” the information they need. Either it’s incomplete, inaccurate, irrelevant, or (far too often) invisible.
Visibility may be the single biggest issue holding back data-driven decision making in higher education. Therefore, solving this issue could have an enormous impact.
How dashboards highlight everything that matters
Across domains, dashboards have shown to be a simple but potent way to turn data into a resource for better decision making.
The basic concept of dashboards is to collect metrics that matter to a specific decision maker — be that an admissions recruiter or the college dean — in one convenient location they can reference at a glance. Dashboards incorporate hard data, visualizations, and various indicators (up/down arrows, red/green text, etc.) to communicate a lot of information efficiently. That information updates frequently, often multiple times per hour, and it updates automatically, without needing input from either the IT team or the dashboard user.
Dashboards single-handedly address the visibility problem by giving decision makers a rich information resource they can reference at will. They don’t need to request data, they don’t need to wait for reports, and they don’t need to question if the numbers are trustworthy. With dashboards, common questions receive instant answers, important decisions gain valuable context, and objective information replaces assumptions and guesses.
How we can help
As higher education works to become more data-driven, dashboards play an essential role. And as colleges and universities face the challenges ahead, from COVID recovery to declining enrollment, dashboards can help reveal answers to difficult decisions. CLA’s higher education and data analytics and insights teams can help make the implementation easy for institutions of any size. Contact CLA.