Career Pros, Meet Your New Best Friend. . .Institutional Data

Good data + good discussion = great decisions.? I call this my “3D” model and yet today in higher education, too many are still stabbing in the dark, using the other “D”. . .dartboards. . .(or maybe comfort and complacency) to make moves and decisions around serving students.? Today, more than ever it is so important that career development leaders, along with other student service leaders work to define their value to both students, and to institutional decision makers.?

Amid the global financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, a lot of people stopped having babies. The number of births per 1000 women in the U.S. fell from a high of about 68 in 2007 to around 55 today, and that extrapolates to. . .well, a lot!? All of those kids who were never conceived in late 2007 and beyond would have been turning 18 years of age in 2025. Since 2007, the birthrate has fallen enough that in 2025, there will be about a half million fewer students of college age considering attending college each year.? Friends, something is going to give, and I’m telling you, most folks in higher education are far underestimating the impact this will have; it will be decimating. Most profoundly affected will be mid-sized regional comprehensive universities in the Northeast and the Midwest, as well as the more poorly endowed small private colleges, many of whom have already seen their annual freshman class shrink by 40-50% just since the pandemic.

Okay. So that is the end of the doom and gloom – or at least the brutal facts.? Now it is time to do something about it.? It is time for career leaders in higher education – especially in those regional comprehensives – to get serious about what value their office brings to the institution. Idealistically, those of us who work in student services and support tend to value things like: informing students, transforming students, engaging students, directing students and preparing students.? It’s what we do, what we think about, and the reason we come to work.? But it is beyond time for us to starting thinking like the C-level folks on our campus and to start measuring our offices and programs around the following questions:

1.?????? Do we measurably attract new students to our institution?

2.?????? Do our programs measurably promote student persistence at our institution?

3.?????? Do we measurably help students graduate at higher levels?

4.?????? Do our efforts measurably result in more students finding gainful employment (which keeps institutional loan default rates low)?

5.?????? Do our efforts measurably encourage more alumni to give of their time, talent and treasure?

As a former corporate guy, all of this makes perfect sense to me, but to a lot of long-time higher education people, this concept can sound foreign, or even offensive to some extent.? Never before have we as career leaders had to work at such a high level, to prove the value of our existence on campus. And with this factor pressing at us on one side, and the prospects of artificial intelligence taking over a lot of what we do pressing at us on the opposite side, we need an effective strategy, and we need it now.

Well, I do not write this to offer a universal strategic plan to everyone, however, I am here to say that data, and monetized interventions absolutely must be part of what we do moving forward from here.? Here are some reasonable goals to set for the next couple of academic years:

·???????? Can you focus your programming and action in a way that demonstrates monetary value to your institution?

·???????? How can you restructure your program in a way – working with enrollment management – that your work becomes one of the top reasons that new students choose your school?? It’s hard to trim a department that is one of your key enrollment drivers.

·???????? In what ways can you, or your supervisor advocate to provide you with direct access to institutional data, and/or predictive analytics, or at least provide a strong partner in institutional research who will build you a series of structured dashboards or on-demand reports that can guide your decisions at any given moment.

·???????? In what way can you build cross-functional relationships, forging symbiotic relationships that promote utilization of your center, while promoting improved student persistence in certain colleges or academic majors?

·???????? What does it mean to position your career office in a way that you are building a culture around ‘career as a priority’?

·???????? How can you adjust your liaison structure to take more of a consulting approach?? Rather than asking department chairs to cooperate with you on things, ask them what problems they need to solve among their students and then craft a career-based solution to solve it.? I mean, who doesn’t want someone to solve their problems for them?

Career leaders, you need access to data, and I am not talking about CMS data, I am talking about institutional data:

?? Common data sets

?? Enrollment funnel data

?? College/academic major enrollment

?? GPAs – final and mid-term

?? Pre-college high school performance

?? First-gen/Non-first-gen

?? Race and ethnicity

?? Historic first year persistence rates by major

?? Historic first year persistence rates by population

?? Credits earned and credits earned ratios, by student ID

?? Lists of your highest D/F/W courses, and pre-term access to students enrolled in those courses

?? LMS utilization data

. . .and lots, lots more (be sure to be respectful of FERPA, only requesting data for actionable purposes).? As I look down this list, given student and course section detail on each of these, anyone could readily design at least a few dozen different career interventions, and over time, track enrollment and persistence rates in ways that can at least prove association, or – longitudinally with larger data sets – causation that can also be monetized.? If we have not done so already, we in career development need to start to take institutional ROI seriously, in order to shore-up our staff and our functional area.

So, how might you start to design a career intervention around some of these data sets?? Let me offer two examples from the list above.

Historic first year persistence rates by academic major:? Ask your IR department to prepare you a list of all of your academic programs or departments, along with the five year average annual first year persistence (retention) rate for each program or department.? Ask IR to provide it in the form of a heat map that shows 1) the majors/departments with the highest percentage of attrition (number of students lost from your institution from that major) as a function of their total first-year student census enrollment, and 2) also provide a heat map of how much each department contributes to overall, annual student attrition.? Voila!? A ready-made career intervention.? Programs obviously want to keep their students (i.e. it protects faculty jobs for one thing), and we know that students who have a solid but malleable range of plans and goals for their major are far more likely to persist.? Ask the faculty chair if they would consult with you in an effort to bolster their first-year persistence rate.? Then design a first-year career assignment customized for that department to get students excited about the future!? Don’t forget to keep all of the ID numbers of students who were part of that intervention so that you can follow their persistence rates into the future. Maybe you design it as a case-control study where half of first year students in a given academic major participate in the intervention and the other half do not.

List of your institution’s highest D/F/W courses: ?This is a list of those courses that result in the highest numbers of D’s, F’s and withdrawals.? Make sure you get trend data on this over the past few years including percentages of D/F/Ws among all students enrolled in those sections, and maybe ask for a bar or line graph that shows the trend over time.? Then, design a pre-semester career intervention with students.? Offer it on Zoom over the summer or winter and keep it short and highly informative and actionable. In order to persist in those difficult courses, our more academically marginalized students tend to need motivation: “Why in the world am I sitting in this course.? It is pointless!”? We’ve all heard this statement plenty of times.? Maybe you offer a short and impactful career program featuring successful alumni who had to take those courses, who are now in a position to provide precise context as to why those courses are important to their industry. Maybe the alum can be set up as semester mentors (not tutors) to provide encouragement, continually linking world-of-work information throughout that semester to the course sections.? Again, this could be set up as a case-control, or simply as action research.

Whether it is the threat of the looming “demographic cliff” which will affect vast numbers of institutions, or the threat of career professionals being replaced by open AI tools, it is time to step up, gain access to and learn to use institutional and other data to our advantage, and to the advantage of our students.? And, one more thing.? If your institution is fortunate enough to have one of the commercial predictive analytics tools, this tool alone can be incredibly powerful in designing career interventions because these tools can determine, at any given moment, which of your enrolled students are most at-risk for attrition.

If you would like to learn more about using institutional data to design career interventions, considering purchasing access to the NACE webinar I offered a while back (I do not benefit financially from this webinar).? It will get your creative juices flowing and build a foundation for action as you take on the challenges ahead.

It’s your future.? Take charge!

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Thank you for reading. Additional thanks to Civitas Learning, Inc. for providing exceptional predictive administrative analytics products that I use every day, and that I mentioned within this article.