Tracking and using data to inform decisions pays off for college success programs on multiple levels. Having data allows program staff to monitor the progress of individual students and tailor support to their particular needs. It enables staff to understand the effectiveness of program activities and make improvements as necessary. Most…

Higher education leaders have repeatedly called for improved diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, but many institutions continue to fall short. Data can play an integral role in this work; key among them are data on student demographics, including race/ethnicity. Meeting diversity, equity, and inclusion goals requires a thorough and nuanced…

From Fall 2019 through Spring 2020, The Hunt Institute released a series of policy briefs, "Attainment for All: Postsecondary Pathways," that highlighted scalable state-level strategies to boost postsecondary attainment rates among specific student subpopulations including high school graduates, first-generation students, and adult…

The Program for International Student Assessment Young Adult Follow-up Study (PISA YAFS) is a follow-up study with students who participated in PISA 2012 in the United States. The study is designed to measure how performance on PISA 2012 relates to subsequent measures of outcomes and skills of young adults on an online assessment, Education and…

Texans ages 25-34 who earn an associate degree are nearly twice as likely to earn at least $50,000 per year than those who don't earn a degree (24% vs. 13%). Those earning a bachelor's degree or higher are nearly four times as likely to reach this self-sustaining wage (49% vs. 13%). If every eighth grader in Harris County were to earn an associate…

Introduction: Prior to 1980, U.S. national demographic and health data collection did not identify individuals of Hispanic/Latina/o heritage as a population group. Post-1990, robust immigration from Latin America (e.g., South America, Central America, Mexico) and subsequent growth in U.S. births, dynamically reconstructed the ethnoracial lines…

COVID-19 has exacerbated existing equity gaps and made college persistence even more difficult for students with less access to resources and opportunities than their White or wealthier peers. Altogether, these challenges require organizations to establish new approaches to engaging college students and monitoring their academic progress and…

The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF)'s mission is to break the link between family income and educational achievement. This is achieved through summarising the best available evidence in plain language, generating new evidence of 'what works' to improve teaching and learning, and supporting teachers and school leaders to use research evidence…

State education data systems help policymakers use data to evaluate the impact of their efforts to improve education. By disaggregating the data -- that is, breaking it out by different student subgroups -- policymakers can ensure that their efforts address the needs of students who have been traditionally underserved in educational settings. Yet…

As part of the cycle for reporting on the implementation of the Scottish Attainment Challenge (SAC), attainment advisors produce reports triannually. This process ensures there is a continuous narrative where next steps are identified and progress made towards them. This summary report is an overview of the analysis of the progress of all 32 local…

The National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) has available for research a large data warehouse of enrollment and graduation information from 1993 to the present for nearly all postsecondary students in the United States. In this most recent academic year, 18 million currently enrolled students alone were added to the database. Some of the following…

Career and technical education (CTE) programs (programs that teach students specific workplace skills aligned with the labor market) may track data for lots of different reasons: to comply with funding requirements, to manage their services and continually improve, to measure their progress toward their goals, and to evaluate whether they are…

"The Virginia Plan for Higher Education" articulates the objective that the Commonwealth will be the best-educated state by 2030. To achieve this objective, Virginia not only must increase educational-attainment rates, but also close the gaps in the differing rates of attainment that exist across its population and its regions. The…

With the introduction of the Teaching Excellence Framework a lot of attention is focussed on measuring learning gains. A vast body of research has found that individual student characteristics influence academic progression over time. This case-study aims to explore how advanced statistical techniques in combination with Big Data can be used to…

In the Australian higher education sector, the challenges to successful engagement and retention experienced by Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander students and communities are considerable. They persist despite many well-intentioned attempts to address this issue and to strengthen equity in participation in the sector. Implicated in this is…