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Framework for Complete College America’s Public Research Agenda

Summary

NCHEMS assisted Complete College America (CCA) in developing a blueprint for a public-facing research resource. CCA sought guidance about how it might develop and maintain a set of national and state-level data relevant to its mission, particularly relating to leading and lagging indicators of student success and college completion. The organization plans to publish the data on its website and to use it in reports, presentations, and for internal decision-making.

CCA asked NCHEMS to help identify data sources and methods needed to build this dataset. NCHEMS’ report offered suggestions for how CCA could carve out a distinctive niche among numerous other online data repositories. This report recommended including specific metrics — such as innovative ways to combine data sources and options for disaggregation — and outlined strategies for maintaining the data over time.

CCA chose NCHEMS as its partner in this work due to our depth of experience analyzing higher education data, particularly national data from public sources, our commitment to effectively using data in decision-making, and past collaborations with CCA that used data to support its mission.

Topics Challenges Approach

Topics

  • Analytics and Data Support
  • Student Success

Challenges

There is a wealth of data related to the broad topic of student success. NCHEMS had to make careful decisions about which data to include — and especially, which to exclude — from our recommendations to CCA. We made these decisions by identifying metrics that support CCA’s mission, listening to feedback from CCA stakeholders, and identifying areas where CCA could add value to what is already available without duplicating work from other entities.

Approach

There were four main components to our approach:

  1. Conduct a scan of the existing landscape of national data on postsecondary student success. Excellent dashboards have proliferated in recent years. Our goal for this scan was to identify what unique niche(s) CCA can fill that add value to what is already available.
  2. Listen to stakeholders. NCHEMS conducted interviews with CCA staff, board members, and some of the organization’s external state-level partners. These interviews helped us understand these stakeholders’ goals and data needs.
  3. Create a data-dictionary-style resource of data sources, metrics, and definitions. The selection of metrics in this resource was based on the landscape scan and interviews.
  4. Identify implementation recommendations. This component focuses on the practicalities of maintaining the data set and making it accessible to decision-makers in a useful format.