“Unless we improve the data on individual and institutional performance, until we count everybody, include every institution, routinely gather data on outputs as well as inputs, we’re poking in the dark,” said Daniel Greenstein, director of Education, Postsecondary Success at the Seattle-based Gates Foundation.
Greenstein made his remarks in a conference call to release a new report titled, “Answering The Call: Institutions and States Lead the Way Toward Better Measures of Postsecondary Performance.”
The report contains a proposed “framework” to examine how institutions are performing in the areas of access, progression, completion, cost and post-college outcomes, and being able to assess how different groups — such as low-income students or students of color — are doing in those categories.
And it calls for taking a more detailed look at institutional performance by examining factors such as how many students complete “gateway courses” and how many credits they have completed and accumulated, since those things are said to be predictive of completion. The idea is to identify areas where students may need support so that institutions can help more students earn their degrees.
“With the exception of first-year retention rates, none of these measures are publicly available in national datasets like IPEDS,” the report says, using the acronym for the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.
“This is stunning, really, because there is tons of data around higher education, only it is so inconsistent, so patchy, it makes us information poor even as we are data rich,” Greenstein said.
