Re-invention, and a Caution

I've discovered recently, after years of just being a "big nerd", that I am actually a Data Scientist.  Imagine!  But wait, let me take some credit....perhaps I was only in stealth mode.

This clever marketing of professionals every organization needs tickles me to no end.  I wish I'd thought of it.  Suddenly there is buzz about the shortage of us in the workforce.  I'm heartened by that recognition after my earlier rant in this space about the big data spree and the looming need for sense-making and pattern recognition among all those data points.

Readers...what kind of data scientists do you see being needed by your organizations?  What kind of information is most helpful to today's decision-making workforce, and where would you want to look to find it most easily?

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Complete topic change.  Lately I have gotten a couple of troubling data requests from "consultants" who want individual level student data.  We're not comfortable with that, largely because of privacy concerns, and also because of some federal legislation that we dislike to violate.  Messy...

In a few cases, these "consultants" have turned out to be marketing firms upon further examination.  Colleagues, please check out all outside requests.  Even one that looked legitimate on its face turned out to be unaffiliated with the research study it purported to sponsor.

May your zeroes and ones all land in the right fields.

Too many degrees/certificates?

In search of wisdom:  is there an optimal ratio of possible different degrees to the number of students you serve?  

Some institutions, notably the for-profits, and some who serve a large population of nontraditional students, find that a targeted suite of choices works well for them.  Others, notably community colleges and others with a more open enrollment, offer a wide range of degree and certificate possibilities.

I am in search of effectiveness…how do you decide?  How many degrees or certificates?  What makes for critical mass at your place in terms of number of students, organizational resources, and so on?  Is it a different model for different institutions?

In other news, we’ve survived another Spring term, wept a few happy tears for our graduates, and now we are looking at our summer project schedule.  I’m all excited because I finally hope to have time to do some modeling of how intent may relate to achievement, persistence, or completion for our students.

May you have clean data.

Reflecting on Reflecting

First, let's define our key term.  By reflection, I mean the ability to look back on experience, process, or systems, and seek knowledge from examining them in light of perspective gained from time's passage.

Reflection can help us refine our practices.  However, should we find ourselves in overwhelming circumstances, as many do in higher education in these busy times, the time and energy to engage in reflection may seem like a luxury that cannot be justified.  This is a mistake I have made myself.

Higher education attracts people with a passion for problem solving.  Fixers is the term I sometimes use to describe us.  We love to fix things, or help make them better.  I hate to admit this again...and again...but my father gave me good advice.  He suggested I couldn't fix everything, and that I should put some reasonable boundaries on what I attempted, so that I didn't burn out.  Are we all surprised that fixers violate this at every opportunity?  Not really...

What happens then is a pattern that I should probably recognize by now.  We accept more and more tasks, and eventually our load is greater than our ability to do a quality job at a more focused set of objectives. 

This is where building in reflection as a systematic practice can pay off.  The act of stopping everything and looking carefully at the effectiveness of the current set of efforts, and what effects one may or may not be having as a result, can redirect our passion where it can be the most useful to our organization and colleagues, and most healthy to ourselves.  That is what will keep us making the strongest contribution we can to the success of our students over the long term.

Sometimes I guess I just need to repeat the lesson.

Elegy for the Shiny

Matt Reed so often gets it right. His essay on the shininess of the new in this blog entry captures well the incentive to innovate at the expense of closure & completion in higher education administration (and perhaps elsewhere, but HE is my focus).

On the one hand, there is some comfort in knowing that an institution is not alone in difficulty with follow-through.  On the other hand, if we all suffer a similar malady, we should be able to address it with some mindful commitment of resources.  Yet, as noted by several folk with respectable credentials, the incentives tend to run the other way at the administrative level.  We end up feeling like we don’t finish anything.  The launch is all.

The frustration lies in part in the mismatch between the pace of change (slow) in higher education organizations compared to the contemporary demands for change from the social and political environments in which we operate.  In short, large educational organizations still plan years in advance, and commit their resources to longer term projects.  Why?  So we can offer our students an opportunity to plan their trajectory.   

We are also tasked with using the public funds with which we are entrusted by our taxpayers as efficiently as possible to promote educational success in our service area.  Oddly enough, we don’t have climbing walls or any of the other things about which some pundits like to hyperventilate.  We also have no federal loans, and therefore a zero default rate.  It’s a rather different picture here than what one might gather from the media coverage.

Legislatures and think-tanks have the luxury of demanding turns on a dime; however, without the caveat that they also provide a concomitant increase in wherewithal to make nimble change occur, and to keep it going thereafter.  If there is new money available, it frequently is for the program start-up, not for sustainable operations.  As much as we’d like to implement a promising new program, many a time the decision has been to wait until we can support it beyond the initial investment.  When we do launch something new, changes in the world beyond our doors may make the effort obsolete well before implementation is achieved.

There's nothing quite like the feeling of starting something wonderful, and then having the funding disappear.  It is painfully regrettable when new programs with the potential to improve things for our students die on the vine for lack of continuing investment.

Wherein I ponder the topic of student surveys...

We do pretty well here at not over-surveying our students.  I have, however, worked at and heard about other places where survey fatigue is not just a theoretical possibility, but an everyday reality. 

Surveys are a quick and relatively inexpensive way to gather a lot of information about our students, their experiences, their perceptions, and their desires.  They can become too much of a good thing, and it's not a bad idea to think about how we might identify other ways to achieve similar data collection.  At the very least we can examine our surveying schedule from a meta-view and determine what would be optimal deployment for the organizational survey resources we simply must use.

My pet peeve: duplicate questions.  If I ask you about data that is not likely to change during your tenure with us, do I really need to confirm and reconfirm that datum every survey?  There are enough things that do change, and that we need to ask about more than once for that reason.

Most surveys are entirely too long.  Some engage too many topics.

We are encouraging more of a point-of-service approach to surveys, in which we gather only very limited, targeted information at the point at which the student is having the experience in question.  It works better with their time commitments, minimizes errors of memory in self-reports, and gives us very quick feedback if something is amiss in our operations.

What we have not done, historically, is centralize oversight of surveying to maximize its efficiency and exert quality control over the instruments that are utilized around the college.  I would be very interested to hear how other organizations manage their survey processes around these considerations, and any others I may have neglected to address.

Golden Eggs / ROI

Caution, public policy rant ahead...

In Aesop’s fable about the goose who laid the golden eggs, a domestic bird has the happy ability to lay one golden egg each day.  Greedy humans, however, decide that there must be a supply of gold inside the bird, and kill it, only to find it is quite ordinary within.   

This lesson, that overreaching for riches may end a perfectly good situation, is a truism in our culture.  However, there may be another lesson that Aesop’s prodigious bird can help us learn.

Consider the opposite extreme, if you will.  Motivated by whatever interesting calculus of profitability or efficiency, what happens when the farmer and his wife decide to reduce their feeding of the goose, to cut costs and thereby maximize the return they get from the golden eggs?

This is a current trend in higher education that bears stronger examination.  If we starve the goose beyond its ability to thrive or survive, will it continue to deliver the eggs?  What is the reasonable level of investment in higher education that will result in the desired beneficial outcomes to the individuals involved, and to the larger society?  

It will perhaps be difficult to realize a return on an investment that we have not made in the future prospects of our fellow citizens.

What to do about the undecided?

There has been a fabulous discussion on LinkedIn (which of course now I can't locate) about the proportion of students at our various institutions who are undeclared or undecided about their education goals when they join us.

One dilemma is what to do about their data for our reporting and analysis of educational intent.  In the current higher education environment at the federal and state level, much of the discussion is about success in the form of degree completion.  This predicates the collection of a stated educational goal, or intent, from the student at their entry so that we can then measure whether or not we supported them in achieving it.

Another issue is the integrity of our data.  We wonder if some students are just being entered as undecided if they don’t immediately self-identify with a specific program or major goal.

Our third challenge is with blanks.  As we say around here, blank is not data.  Was the field skipped?  Was the student undecided?  Is it an error in data retrieval?  Even worse are fields with only a space.  They look like blanks but read like data to our system.

Those are the nerd issues.  Then there are the academic ones.  Should we require the students to make a decision/commitment?  Some research indicates this might help retention.   

What if they are genuinely undecided?  Can we leave a space for that exploration in an environment in which our ability to serve them rests on how many we can get to degree or certificate completion?  What is best for the student in the long and short term?

We are still mulling these questions…comments are welcome.