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Digital Squared
Digital Squared
UC Irvine Student Success: A Year of Growth & Learning
Tom is joined by UCI Professor Richard Arum, Vice Provost for Enrollment Management Patty Morales, Assistant Vice Chancellor & Chief of Staff for Student Affairs Edgar Dormitorio, Associate Vice Provost for Division of Career Pathways Suzanne Helbig, and Vice Provost for Teaching & Learning Michael Dennin.
Watch the recorded video of this episode on Youtube.
Tom Andriola
Hello, I'm Tom Andriola, Vice Chancellor and Chief Digital Officer at UC Irvine, and welcome to our continuing conversation around Compass, our data-driven student success initiative. I'm joined today by our esteemed panel: Richard Arum, Project Director of our UCI MUST initiative, Patti Morales our Vice Provost of Enrollment Management. Edgar Dormitorio, our Associate Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs, Suzanne Helbig, our Associate Vice Provost of Career Pathways, and Michael Dennin, our Vice Provost of Teaching and Learning. Welcome, everyone. This is a continuing conversation on how we are approaching student success here at UC Irvine. We came together about a year ago talking about our initiative and our vision for student success 3.0. And we're here to share with you kind of what we've done in the last year and what we're doing going forward. So I'd like to start with the group and talk about, let's talk about the strides we've made over the last year because we've done a lot of things. Michael, maybe you'd like to talk about some of the things in your area.
Michael Dennin
Sure. You know, I think one of the biggest new things is also an old thing, which is a weird thing to say. And I just want to be honest here, you know, we started this with a lot of dashboards for faculty before the pandemic. And there were two things going on back then. One is, we had older software. So I'll be frank, the dashboards weren't as easy to manage, they weren't as friendly to use. Then we had a pandemic. And it was interesting coming out of that, how many faculty forgot they had dashboards. So a lot of this year was sort of two things, really refreshing to new versions, new software that's attractive to faculty, adding some new ones, and then re-engaging with the faculty that this is actually a tool for them. Two big ones to highlight. One is for the faculty, but really, for the academic leaders, we rolled out a whole new way of looking at course outcome gaps. We had talked about that some in our last discussion, but really driving home that it’s core structures, course design, courses that have outcome gaps, not faculty or students, right and getting the focus there. And then the other fun one is really setting up for faculty the ability for them in a single dashboard to look at the history of what they've been doing in their teaching. Up to this point, the dashboards, really, if you wanted to know sort of a historical track, you kind of had to look up each course in your history. But now as a faculty, you'll be able to go and just look at the whole thing. So making it easier for faculty, making it easier for administrators, bringing in some new dashboards really focused around equity and structures in the university, I think in the teaching and learning space, were some of the big steps forward.
Tom Andriola
Patty, in Enrollment Management, your team plays a critical role with delivering data to units across campus to help in decision making. Can you talk about the big accomplishments in the last 12 months?
Patty Morales
Sure. We've added more partners across campus, more collaborators, in various offices and divisions across campus and their data sources. For example, more data sources from Student Affairs, from Division of Career Pathways, who come to us at Enrollment Management Analytics to say, “Hey, can that EMA platform - the enrollment management analytics platform - do something with this data?” What interesting insights can we generate from it, especially when combined with the other data sources already there. And that's really the magic of EMA – it’s in the way that we're bringing different data sources together in these really interesting constellations. And being able to kind of work with our end users to say, what would be interesting to you to learn? We always approach our end users with that fundamental question, what do you wish you knew? And if we realize that there would be a data set or some source that would help sort of further elucidate, then we have those conversations with other stakeholders and see what we can do. That's a big development. And another is, this is really exciting. We're beginning to start a migration of the EMA platform to the AWS cloud, which will enable us to have that much greater facility with the architecture of the data underneath the platform and continue to have that robust support into the future and allow that tool to continue to mature. So that's been a very exciting development as well. I think those are the two main new engagements over the last 12 months.
Tom Andriola
Now, one of the big things we talked about a year ago was having a top-ten School of Education nationally gives us this, this unique opportunity to be at the cutting edge of research about important questions, and then use the campus as a living lab to take those research findings and put them into practice as well as take feedback of practice and find the right research questions next. So, Richard, what are the big things you'd say are the insights that research has taught us?
Richard Arum
Yeah. So first of all, when I think about this work, I think of it as a marathon. It's not a sprint. And so a lot of last year, I think, super successful, building out the research capacity, and the data. And so let me give you just a few examples. Again, from our colleagues here. Career Services we spent all of last year taking advantage of this fine grained data, observing students’ career preparation, exploration, applications to internships, going to career fairs. Integrating that data with the rest of the campus data to make sense of how students are preparing themselves for success after college. With Student Affairs, we took advantage of new data from this platform called CampusGroups where we have detailed records of not just participation in extracurricular activities and clubs, but also students who've taken on leadership roles. Those two things are actually career preparation. Extracurricular participation, leadership, those two things are potentially related. Because if you go to a career fair, one of the things you learn is you can put on your resume, that you not only were in a club, you were a leader in your club. And so we think that when we bring these data into conversation with each other, we can see patterns like that. Then from the registrar's office, we've been integrating new data on students’ housing arrangements, their roommates. Also new data on where students are ending up after they graduate in terms of labor market outcomes, and attending graduate schools. And so we have data from the National Student Clearinghouse, and the campus just this past year has gotten some employment occupational data that we're integrating. So this is a big part of what we've been doing. One more thing is the campus expanded last year, to be the first UC in the system to offer an undergraduate degree in prisons. And, of course, at a major research university, you'd want to track those students to make sure that they were receiving the same benefits that students on our own campus are receiving. And so we brought the UCI MUST project into the prison, where we're tracking those students over time with very similar measures to what we're using here on campus.
Tom Andriola
So I think this is something that we talk about all the time, right, which is, in this digitally driven world that we now live in, there's so much technology that's creating new data signals for us to think about how we can understand our students, I like to say holistically and longitudinally. So Edgar, you're here from Student Affairs, right? I mean, this place, this part of our world is exploding. Can you talk a little bit about the technology deployment and how that data is becoming more useful for how you think about supporting our students?
Edgar Dormitorio
Sure, I mean, I think, and I say this in various different kinds of conversations and forums that we have, but you know, we're trying to meet the students where they're at. And technology, their use of their mobile devices, that's their everyday reality, right. And so we really have to think about ways in which we leverage the use of that technology and their experiences on campus. Richard talked a little bit about our CampusGroups platform that we use. You know, we're really trying to promote our units to incorporate the use of CampusGroups for students who are attending events. We have a card swipe system, so we're integrating that even more so students when they go to an event or get a service on campus, we know what kind of service that they're receiving. And then we're working with our partners in EMA, Patty talks about that as well, to make meaning of all of that information. So I think probably the best examples are places like our Basic Needs Center, where we really know who's using that. And we can look at some trends and adjust our programs accordingly.
Tom Andriola
And with our really diverse student body, right, I mean, we have to really kind of meet our students where they’re at, since they come to us from very different starting points. So Suzanne, right, you and I talk a lot about it's not just about walking across the stage, right, but it's about setting up for the next chapters. And in running Career Pathways, you think a lot about the way that students consume your services while here, and then where they end up next. How is technology and data transforming? And where are these connection points for you?
Suzanne Helbig
I love that question, because it acknowledges that career development is about the student experience, and then how it sets up the students for lifelong success and learning. And so a little similar to what Edgar was saying, we also try to meet students where they are. One of our key strategies is infusing career readiness development into the life of a student. So not necessarily expecting them to get all of their career development from the Division of Career Pathways, but deploying those technologies and those best practices that students can encounter in their classes, in their student activities. So they, career development is not an opt-in activity, they're getting it wherever they're at. And so when it comes to technology, kind of similar to CampusGroups, we have a platform that students can access to find job opportunities. In this platform, the more information, the more students put into it, the better the algorithm gets in suggesting activities and jobs for them. It's where they sign up for internships, for career fairs, they have interactions with employers within the platform. And that's some of the data that that Richard is pulling on. And then we also have other technologies that we've had success with faculty, teaching faculty, infusing it into their classroom activities. So those are just a few of the ways that we're thinking about technology, and really using it to scale Career Services. And it’s that equity piece, making sure that all students have access to Career Services, not just the ones who come through our doors.
Tom Andriola
One of the things that I enjoy most about this program, you know, being a part of it here at UCI, is, watching the pieces come together. And what's been interesting is, we've been talking to our colleagues across the country at other institutions, one of the comments that gets made to me is, you mean, those people actually talk to each other? They actually share data with each other and work together? And it's like, you know, to me, I was just like, This just seems very natural, right? If we want to understand our students, meet them where they're at, we have to be sharing the, you know, the signals that we all individually gather. But universities, as we know, can be very siloed. We've also talked about this, from the standpoint of that, you know, we have thousands of people every day who are here to support our students in one way, shape, or form. And we want this data to be available to them, right? So we launched our Community of Practice, to really try to create something we refer to as a data-driven culture. Have we made the right types of strides to build a data-driven culture? I mean, Patty, I'll start with you, right? Because I'd love for you to talk about what Navigators are and how you've used it to drive that culture.
Patty Morales
Sure. So Navigator is a service, it's both a service that we're offering as part of the Compass initiative, but it's also sort of a principle, and that's one of partnership and collaboration. And what it's starting from is the idea that whatever platform you might have, those resources aren't just static, they're not just there to go retrieve something. It's really about working in collaboration with other colleagues to figure out what to do with the information that is there. And unless there's that back and forth, that iterating, it could almost be like a library that just has resources sitting there. But yeah, you could pull a book off the shelf or download an article, but unless you're in conversation with somebody else about that, you're limited in what you discover. So the Navigator service is about our team or any of our colleagues’ teams, guiding another colleague on what's available. But then it also is reciprocal, because that end user can then offer us, who do the development, some further ideas. They can ask those questions we haven't thought to ask, because that's what they do. That's their world. A quick example is we've heard from advisors, it would be really useful for them if they knew who still had an outstanding unpaid bill at the end of fee deadline. So there are students who still haven't paid their bill who are third or fourth year, and they still have an outstanding balance. They wanted to know not just who they are, but more importantly, how many of them are close to graduating or missing certain gateway courses. Because what they want to do is hone on as quickly as possible, the students who need the most immediate intervention. That takes two or three different data sources to come together. My team would not have necessarily thought to explore that. It was the engagement with our colleagues that allowed for that. And the culture part is because we are so willing to just work with one another and have that fluidity of you know, exchange and without that I don't think you can really have that data-driven aspect of what we all aspire to.
Tom Andriola
Others wanting to comment on the Community of Practice concept for us?
Michael Dennin
You know, I think one of the really useful things about it, is bringing together you know, faculty and staff think about these things, I think somewhat differently. They come from different frameworks, and they worry about different things. And so, what's nice is we're engaging on all of these levels. And I think, you know, at the faculty level, having Richard and UCI MUST group, faculty have colleagues who are handling and studying the data from within UCI, who they know they trust, it's not an outside thing. We have a very robust Academic Senate partnership, you know, we meet regularly. Tom, you and I are on sort of the right committees ex officio, we're regularly discussing if there's questions about the space and how the data is being used, and where it's going to get answered very quickly. I think at some places that may not happen as fast. And then if you're not answering the questions quickly, then all sorts of weird ideas spread. So I think I think the community aspect and the education aspect has been really key and useful.
Tom Andriola
You know, the other program I'll point to is that, you know, the MAPSS program really is about building stronger data literacy and data skills for people to use data, right? We'd like people to be self-serving, where they can, right, we'd like to have more those people on campus. But for the people who then need to reach out and work with someone to figure out the right question or the data sources that will answer that question, we've got, you know, we've got Navigator, right. So this concept of MAPSS for upskilling people, Explorer for self-service, Navigator for what I call concierge services, is really moving us in the right direction in building momentum.
So when I think about last year, when we did our session, the most commented quote out of last year, Richard goes to you, when you said it, it's “Tthe students are not the problem.” Right? And so out of that we really came up with this part of Compass that is identifying, addressing structural barriers that keep our students from being able to succeed in the way that they want to succeed. What, what strides forward have we made on that front in understanding it, and then addressing it, because there's a research aspect to it? And then there's, how do we get into the problem and fight the institutional structures?
Richard Arum
Well, one way to think about it is that college is very confusing for many students that come into it. It's not clear what they're supposed to do, what is associated with later lifelong success? And so one of the structural barriers, if you will, is lack of information on what's important for their own development in college. And so one way you can think about that is, can you work together, take this data, develop tools that put this information in front of students in a way that might help guide them along paths that are going to lead to their lifelong success. So you could put in front of them information, not just on their academic progress in terms of their GPA, they know that, but you could also put in front of them information about their academic behavioral engagement in the LMS system relative to their peers, which they just might not know that the effort they're putting in isn't adequate to attain the outcomes that they're hoping for. But not just the academic, not just the coursework. College is so important for broader human development. So you could put in front of them information about Career Services. Did you know that half of the students in your major have already reached out to Career Services and attended career exploration activities, career fairs, and you haven't done that yet? Just put that information in front of them. Or think about the extracurricular activities, put it in front of them. Most students by the time they're at your point on campus, have joined three clubs. We noticed you haven't joined any clubs yet. So you can put in front of them information that might point them into directions that are important for lifelong success. I'm gonna go back to the extracurricular stuff for a second, because one of the most interesting findings we came upon this past year is, if you remember, we've partnered with ETS Educational Testing Service to assess students on 21st century workforce tasks at multiple points in time. And one of the tasks that's really hard to move with students, is something called perspective taking. Taking the perspective of people different than yourself in complex social scenarios. This is something humans are not very good at. We tend to see the world in a particular way and dismiss other viewpoints as just wrong and not open to the nuances of the situation. So can you move people on perspective taking, so they get better at that over time? Turns out, when you look at the data from CampusGroups, students who had participated in three or more groups moved up at a much higher rate, significantly gained on this task relative to anyone else. So it turns out by having students engaged with others, where they're confronting different perspectives and opinions, is very critical for the human development you're hoping to achieve in college.
Michael Dennin
I want to do two things. I want to first double down, Richard, on your first comments about, you know, this putting information in front of students. I think this is something that if people look closely at what we have done and our efforts, you will find that we have avoided predictive analytics. And you might wonder why. And it's I think, a very, very conscious choice on our part, right? Because at the end of the day, I think Edgar said it very well, we need to meet students where they are. And predictive analytics are very good at giving you a sense of sort of the likelihood of things. And I've always felt they don't necessarily do much very well, for the individual student. You mentioned this, Tom, it's much more about the institution. So the one place we used it under the hood, was we evaluated things like impact of change of major rules. And we discovered from the research that our student, we have a rule that you needed a 2.0 overall. Well, let's face it, students who are typically in their first year, picking a major they don't like, are typically the ones below 2.0. Well, now they have to do a lot of work to get above 2.0, before they can even graduate. So if you're looking at it sort of from a predictive analytics point of view, you would predict that students with below a 2.0 are not very likely to graduate. Well that one doesn't learn a lot. And what you've really learned is there is a barrier there, and we actually went to the Senate with the data, the Senate’s changed the rules. This is our first spring, we're going to be operating under the new rules. We have a lot of work to do now to push that information out. You know, I've met with student government and they didn’t know the rules have changed. So clearly, some emails, you know, need to be worked on. But this is what we've really focused on as a next step. So there's a structural change to your first question, Tom, right, from research to policy and implementation. And now we need to do more. But you take that sort of structural change, you take the stuff Richard talked about, you know, and now, in addition to all the other nudges and things you might tell a student about, you could even say things like, you know, there's a better way to say this. Someone much smarter at nudges would frame it better, but you don't seem to be enjoying your major. Have you realized that half the students on the campus change their major, find something better? Well not better, find something they like more. And here's, here's the resource to learn what else is out there. Here's the way you change it. You know, lots of people end up in this position where they're not getting great grades, because they don't like their major. It's nothing about you. It's very recoverable from, and off you go, right. That's, I don't view that as predictive analytics. I view that as what Richard is talking about, it’s sort of letting students better understand the landscape, because you want to give them the self-efficacy. You want them to build this, this sort of skill of looking what's around them, and knowing that there's choices and then making the choices themselves. So I think that was both an answer to your question, Tom, and a reiterating and doubling down what Richard said. And so it's very exciting, those sort of interactions.
Patty Morales
And if I could add another example that's more on the administrative side that comes up as a barrier that a lot of times folks don't think about very much are the sort of just activities that students need to do: to register, to pay a bill, to access their aid. And sometimes it's a very, you know, seemingly innocuous thing like a parking ticket that had been unpaid. And a student wasn't aware. And now a bill is due and their financial aid has covered their tuition, but it didn't cover that parking ticket. Now they have an unpaid balance. Depending on the scenario, it can sometimes result in the student being dropped from classes. If they are dropped from classes, now they're below the number of units that they need to have to retain their aid. Now they've lost aid. Now the student has to figure out how to reconcile all of that, and the cascading impacts. And then it can sort of distract their attention. Worst case, they can't attend classes for a week or two. Now they're behind by the time they are able to re-engage. It manifests as though it's an academic problem. It's not an academic problem. It's an administrative challenge. I mean, I don't want to be cavalier about students have to pay bills, they have to accept their aid, they have to do the things. But we have to figure out how we're communicating that to students. What's the right sequence of information by what channel: text messages versus emails, advisors versus the folks in the offices. You know, we have to understand where students are getting snagged, ensnared, and realize that those oftentimes are the barriers that end up resulting in other things on the academic side. So a lot of activities my office is engaged with is figuring out where those are, and seeing what we can do about it. And we already made a big change in the last year related to late fees and everything that's sort of resulted from that. And so we have some policy changes there, like Mike was talking about a policy change in how students change majors. So those are the things we're looking for.
Edgar Dormitorio
Can I comment just really quickly, because I think it also demonstrates not only the interplay between the offices here to recognize these issues, but also speaks to the culture of the campus and the commitment that we all have towards student success. A lot of those issues manifest in, you know, students coming up to one of our campus social workers, and saying, I have one of these issues. And those social workers will see these trends and then work with Patty's office to say, okay, how can we address these? Ultimately, the hope is that we've identified that issue, and then we can make some policy changes to address those issues. But overall, it's this commitment between, we're in different areas, but you know, Student Affairs’ commitment to this as well as Enrollment Management's commitment to this. I mean, it really speaks volumes, I think, to the campus’s culture around trying to make sure our students are succeeding.
Tom Andriola
Yeah, and, you know, there's sometimes the phrase “data rich, information poor” right. I think, you know, we have plenty of data that will point to these issues and point to the issue for that individual student. We're learning how to turn it into information that can flow across silos of the university, right, so that we can be more personalized, right? I love that we're getting away from predictive analytics and treating it as the class of 2024. And really seeing it more as an “n of one” opportunity for us to help each student in the way that meeting, meet them where they're at, and helping the way that they need help and taking away those little snags that sometimes can become huge chasms between where they want to be and where they end up. Yeah.
So, I’d like to pivot to one of the other things that we talked about a year ago and made a lot of strides towards, is big thorny problems require people to work together, right. And we are one institution, we're part of a, you know, a family of 10 in the UC system, and then part of a larger community of R1’s and then, you know, 5000 colleges in the United States, etc. Joining up with others, right? So Michael, you and I sponsored joining Unizin, which is a consortium of like universities really starting to look at, you know, aggregating their data and working with each other on some of these problems. Can you talk a little bit about what the benefits you think are, back to UCI for joining into that partnership?
Michael Dennin
Well, so you know, we'll go right back to Richard's answer of reaching out to our students. The tool Richard talked about that we're developing, that should have a soft launch in the fall, where we do analytics on students, give them some information about themselves, point them to resources, you know, some of that is unique to us. You know, some of it will ultimately be Career Services, CampusGroups data. But a big central core of that is the learning management system data, to the degree that we want to use it. And so, Unizin and their structure, because all the campuses in Unizin do use Canvas, and they handle that part, it was a huge jumpstart. I mean, we had the resources and talent to do it. But it would have taken away from other projects, it would have taken a lot of working time, you know, with what's there, we can do it. And then I'll brag for a moment, you know what, I'll try make it a humble brag, but I'll fail at that. We then bring to it UCI MUST and Richard’s team. So since he pointed out this great project, I'll point out his team in return. And the reason being, you know, a lot of the tools we're building off of are excellent, but they're at universities with a different distribution and student body makeup than we are. To be frank, that's just the way it is - nothing wrong with that. That's just what it is. And so when you think about this idea of pointing students where they need to be, messaging to students. Messaging becomes really clear, really clearly part of the challenge. And I think this is, so it's this partnership with Unizin, and we gain the benefit of quick access to this data, the structure, the ability to do it. And then what we bring to the partnership, is this research expertise that allows us to say, “Okay, if you have almost 50% first gen students, 40% low income, if you're truly going to be Hispanic-serving, not just you know, statistically you know, Hispanic attending, how do you handle this messaging?” How do you reach out to students, so you're not doing all the accidental stereotype threat, you know, negative triggering, like, so you really are bringing the students in and pointing them on the right path? That's fundamentally a research question. And that's really one of the strengths we have, we can now take what would have been the resources and research tools to just build it to begin with, to actually build it as a research platform and iterate it over time because we're not having to worry about the underlying data infrastructure that Unizin brings to us. So it’s a real benefit to us, but then I think we're able to turn it around and make it a benefit to the partnership, because that's what you really want in a consortium, right? You want each individual University bringing their strengths and leveraging off of each other. And we're really able to do that.
Tom Andriola
You know, one of the things that's been a realization to me because, you know, again, some of the other industries I've worked with, it's about building data ecosystems, right? Where you're sharing data. But data ecosystems require some level of data standardization, which in Unizin’s case, there was kind of a unified platform and data standard that we were able to map into and allow us to kind of see the, you know, the full consortium’s data, we want to leverage it for some of our uses. But Suzanne, and Edgar, like in your spaces, I think what were the things we found is there are partners first to reach out to, but kind of the sharing data and benefiting from data looks a little different today. You want to talk a little bit about what we're trying to do, you know, play with some of those other players and what we can do with them going forward?
Suzanne Helbig
Sure, I'll speak to that. I think where this comes up a lot for Division of Career Pathways is the outcomes question. Where are students going? What's their first destination? Beyond that, where are they at two years, five years, 10 years out? Many, many people are interested in this data. You know, students, parents, employers, and then many campus partners, they all want to know. And actually, it can feed into some of these topics we've been talking about earlier of, when you do need to switch your major, you might want to know, what are the potential outcomes of that? So it's stuff a lot of people are interested in. So we found that a lot, there's a lot of pockets on campus that are pursuing the same type of information. And so we've been fortunate to work with a technology partner this year, who will ingest all of that data and create one dashboard. But we've got a lot of work to do. It's not, the data's not where we want it to be.
Tom Andriola
And do you think there are opportunities to work, for example, with the national organization NACE, in terms of, you know, getting more partners to buy into the concept that we're driving? So say, we can actually see data, different work, you know, in depth at our institutions, if we actually standardize?
Suzanne Helbig
Definitely it's something that's a story, we can share at NACE, and I think many, many partners across the country, would be really interested in that. It's a question that I can speak for my career center colleagues, that we all are challenged by. It's very, very hard to get this information. So if we can do it right, which I know we can, we could really be a model. I mean, part of it is you've got students, you're relying on students self-reporting, you're relying on up-to-date LinkedIn profiles. I mean, do we all have up-to-date LinkedIn profiles? So there's a lot of issues at play, but we're making a lot of great strides here. You know, we are partnering with two technology partners right now who are leaders in this space. And I think that's going to really push us forward. But also what's going to push us forward is what we've been talking about – it’s this campus ecosystem, all working together toward one goal.
Edgar Dormitorio
I mean, I feel like, as far as Student Affairs is concerned, we're at the very beginning stages of having conversations around these issues. And what we're trying to do, and thanks to your help, Tom, is really leveraging other campuses across the country, and figuring out where folks are at in thinking about their data strategically. And so, you know, we're having some conversations as early as next week, with folks to figure out okay, what are you looking at in terms of student involvement and engagement? Is there any way that maybe we can come together, and then maybe work with some vendors or industry partners, to come to some agreement about the kind of information we're collecting?
Tom Andriola
Yeah, this is one of my learnings, right, is because universities can be so siloed, right? You know, we found that natural partners already starting to talk with Unizin, but not necessarily some of the other silos and it's different universities we’ll end up kind of working with. And so we have our Waypoints symposium, where we find those like-minded partners, and last year, we didn't have a Student Affairs or a Career Pathways track. This year we do, right? And it's about, Waypoints is all about having the conversations we should be having, but maybe not yet. And out of that always comes ideas for how we could be working together to drive forward. And our goal is to always see UCI as being very involved, if not leading those conversations.
Edgar Dormitorio
Yeah, it's exciting.
Tom Andriola
It is. So let's be honest, it hasn't been all sunshine and rainbows in the last 12 months, either. What are some of the challenges from your perspective as campus leaders that we've run into as we've tried to put this bold idea into, you know, into motion?
Suzanne Helbig
I think there's a lot of brilliant people with a lot of brilliant ideas. And so sometimes like that will lead to questions around sequences, priorities, the capacity to activate all of these ideas. So that's what I've seen. From my perspective.
Michael Dennin
You know, I think I wouldn't say this is so much a challenge, Tom, but it's a reality that we really finally wrapped our hands around and started addressing this year, is the data governance side of this, right? Because, you know, if you're at an institution where data is strongly kept in its silos, you don't really have to worry about data governance as much because it's not getting out anywhere. So there's nothing to govern. Right? But if you're going to actually use it, you know, institutionally, most people really are, are fundamentally okay, they understand like, we should use everything at our disposal to make our students’ lives as good as possible, right? That part, I haven't really seen any pushback on. But, once data is being used, it can be used for other things. And I think people are rightfully sensitive to that. And it's a big organization. And you have a lot of views and different levels of concern over data from security, to privacy, to what it might be used for. I feel like we're navigating that space quite well. But it is a task that has to be taken on and really thought through and done thoughtfully. And so, you know, thanks to your efforts, we do have a data governance group, we have some policies and principles, we have procedures by which people can go find out what data is being used for and what the policies are. And if they have concerns, there's a group to evaluate, do we need to do this. Because I think the usage is a new space. And we are in a world where, you know, people have very different levels of comfort around what might happen to data.
Patty Morales
And if I could pick up on that, you made reference to earlier, Tom, to MAPSS and that program, and set of instructional resources to help our colleagues all become more upskilled, and more literate with data and literate with analytics. Understanding which questions are good ones to ask, and to understand the what I call the who, what, where, when, why and how of data. Who was gathering it. When were they, for what purpose? What do we need to know about its source? Has it changed? You know, learning how to not just take data at face value, but start to ask questions about where did it come from? What was its original sort of reason to be collected? If we're going to use it in a different way, what do we need to be sensitive to? Data definitions? I know that sounds, you know, pretty abstract, but a great example would be in my area residents versus non-residents and being able to track not just enrollments but budgets and to ask a question of, well, how many non-residents do we have? There's about five or six different ways that that term “non-resident” can be further defined. Do you mean, a domestic out of state student? Just non-California? Do you mean an international student? What about students who have AB 540 status who pay California tuition, or have veterans benefits and for that reason, don't pay out of state tuition? Do you mean that when you say non-resident, and sometimes when we're capturing a data element, it's not at that granular level. But it absolutely matters depending on the question you're asking. So we're at that next phase of maturity, with our colleagues, that culture piece where we can spend some time really thinking about that. But it is a challenge, because we have, you know, lots of people wanting to get in there. And, you know, do they know what they're looking at? And how do we get them there?
Michael Dennin
I have to just share one funny story and that sorry, Richard, before you go, and Patty, I always forget is our scale one to four, or one to five, when we evaluate admissions? Is it a four or five?
Patty Morales
The number at the end when we evaluate admissions? Oh, right now – four.
Michael Dennin
So here's the funny part of the story, right? If you're told, something's been evaluated on a scale of one to four, which is highest one or four, right? You would think maybe four because it's higher numerically, but often one, right, it's whoever's in first place is better. So one is maybe better than four. It may be a little known secret that we flipped which was at the top at one point in our history, we don't need to go into details. But not so far back, that if you're doing, which we were in our unit, a study on how does your ranking at the admission stage predict something in a certain class. If you don't have the information that the first half of your data set, maybe one was good, and the second half now four is good, or the other way, like you might not get useful results. Here's the good thing, right, a person doing it very trained in data's like, wait a minute, these results are weird. The person doing has good relations with Patty's team and says, I'm getting a strange result. And we're able to figure all this out. And this is the kind of growing pain time because we learned a couple things. Okay, that wasn't clear in our dataset and in our data delivery, so we have to make sure that it's clean. But you know, lots of lessons learned. But to Patty's point, I mean, so many of these things out there are getting cleaned up. And that's the process, you know, non-resident. I love Patty's also other example that we often talk about is you think GPA is a thing, a single thing. No, there's like eight zillion GPAs out there. And so don't even get started on trying to figure out what that is. But I know, Richard, you had a comment.
Richard Arum
I wanted to respond on a more macro level. And that is, if you think about any industry, its existential survival depends on the development of technology. Keeping up with technological changes, that's about data. It's also about technique, which is pedagogy, how we serve students. But you have to develop that technology to keep up with changing realities in society. And the truth is, even though we're at the forefront here at UCI, we're not moving fast enough to keep pace with all the increasing challenges to the higher education sector. And one of the reasons why we're not moving fast enough is because we're so distracted in our day to day lives, by all the other challenges we're facing in society, but also in higher education, the financial challenges we're facing, the political challenges we're facing, the environmental challenges we're facing, there's so much noise and distractions, that it's hard to focus on this core work that we should be doing. We are doing it, but we're not doing it fast enough because of the level of distractions. And I'll say one other thing. I think there's, you know, let's be honest, there's a reckoning coming. We're facing declining public support for higher education, very challenging political environment, very challenging economic environment. And in order to respond to that, you know, we're going to have to work increasingly work together. And technology is going to be a core part of any solution going forward. And so again, whatever we're doing, we're not doing enough of it, we need to be doubling and tripling down on this investment.
Michael Dennin
And I'm gonna just say sort of yes to that, and do the good, you know, improv thing. “Yes, and…” You know, I always unfortunately have to be somewhat optimistic. And I will say, where my hope in this is, which is going to be a weird place to go. And I apologize for this. Higher Ed has never been known for moving fast, ever. Except at one moment in time recently, particularly at UCI, but across the whole area, we moved incredibly fast. And that was when the pandemic came on. That was an extraordinary event. It moved very fast. Those of you who were involved, we went within two weeks from thinking, oh this might be a week or two, are we going to shut down for a little bit? to our entire spring quarter has to be remote. How do we do it? And we have one week of spring break to get everybody to do it. And I view that Richard, as a little bit of a dress rehearsal for exactly what you pointed out, right? That was exhausting. We did it. We unfortunately came back, and we're regrouping when what we really need to be doing is going and addressing I think the things you've mentioned. Because there is a lot coming on the horizon. But I do think higher ed is fundamentally more nimble than people give it credit for. And I suspect we'll be able to do it. But we do, we have to listen to the call, and we have to get in and accelerate a lot of this. I do wonder if all the noise around generative AI may be that next piece that kicks us into a little faster motion, because that is moving way faster than the typical academic pace. And I think it's gonna make or break us. I think that's the next test to can we wake up, move quickly, and do it. So I hope we can. And you're right, Richard, we're going to have to.
Richard Arum
Well, and just to follow up on your point, we have the capacity, we have the research capacity, the intellectual capacity here at the university to do that work, right. Incredible philosophers, historians, computer scientists, you know, to bring people together to find solutions to these challenges. So I agree with you. But I'm nervous we're not doing more of that today.
Tom Andriola
Well, I think what we'll find is very similar to how we talked about with the students is that, you know, we have, we certainly have the brainpower, we certainly have the innovators at the individual level. What we'll find is the institutional policies and procedures are where the slow incremental change mentality comes from. That will have to be challenged. And we'll have to make changes to some of those things, no different than in helping our students success story. Let's talk about the aspirations for the next 12 months. If I could get each of you to share one, no more than two, things you'd love to see Compass accomplish in the next 12 months. Michael we’ll start at your end.
Michael Dennin
Well, I think the big thing for me really, for the next 12 months, is the tool Richard and I have been talking about, rolling out this tool for students. We're calling it Spark, we've done all the campus presentations, people are very excited about it. It brings together all of our strengths. And I'm just really, really looking forward to that as part of the next 12-month experience.
Richard Arum
And I'll follow up on that to jump in. I agree with that. We're working with Michael's office and with you obviously as well, Tom, to bring research capacity to co-design, this tool, with students, with advisors, with other campus staff. And so we're doing this in a very kind of conscious, deliberate way so that we're not just building a tool and seeing if it's going to work. We're iterating it and incorporating stakeholder feedback from the beginning. I'm very excited about that initiative as well.
Suzanne Helbig
Yeah, what I'm very excited about the next 12 months is rolling out career readiness analytics. And so that's taking even deeper dives into what career readiness activities students are participating in. I'm seeing who's participating, who's not, who could use more navigational help to help them achieve their goals. So looking forward to that, and then just generally speaking about Compass, I'm looking forward to more awareness on our campus about its capabilities and all of the tools that students, staff, faculty can access. It's really an incredible suite of offerings that we've got here.
Edgar Dormitorio
Similarly, I think the Compass effort here, I think, as more folks on the campus learn about it, it will also help us understand what the needs are. So we'll be able to learn from that. And there's a lot of things that are happening in Student Affairs, you know, more integration of course of our systems with CampusGroups, I think there's some practical things like advancing more of the work we're doing in CampusGroups to SDW. So that also has to happen hopefully in the next 12 months. But then some partnerships we have on campus - working with Career Pathways around our learning outcomes, what we expect students to get out of their experiences working on campus, since we employ a lot of students. Aligning those up with the work that Suzanne's doing in her area, and how do we leverage technology so we're capturing that information.
Patty Morales
And for EMA, what I'm really looking forward to in the coming months is exploring how our model and our resources, our platform, can be extended outside of the walls, so to speak of UCI into the community college space potentially. Can we be looking at students who have applied and transferred to UCI from a community college using the EMA data platform model? To really again, elucidate all, so many facets of the student's academic journey, gain those valuable insights, have those conversations with our community college partners that aren't just about an admission statistic, but our really understanding what courses did they take at that community college? How did they articulate what happened once they were at UCI? What was that journey, their outcomes and it loops back around, you know, through Student Affairs, Division of Career Pathways, etc. So I'm really looking forward to those conversations that again, extend what we're doing beyond just our campus. Obviously, the implications are much more broad-reaching than that. So we're just starting to, you know, step out there. We've been talking about Enrollment Management Analytics at various national convenings, conferences, professional organizations. We know that there's interest there, we're hearing a lot of enthusiasm, a desire to engage with us, you know, just outside of UCI, even outside potentially, of the University of California system. We could go bigger.
Tom Andriola
I like to call that influencing the ecosystem. Very good. Well, we're gonna wrap it up here. And I want to first of all, thank you all for your time today and your wonderful comments. Thank you for the partnership that we have. You know, when I came to UCI, people talked about this pioneering spirit, you know, which is part of the DNA at UCI. And then one of the other things that came out as I started to kind of understand the strategic plan is that, you know, so much of the value we create is in valuing different perspectives, right? Which to me is working across the organizational silos and harnessing those different perspectives and creating a third solution that's better than any one that any one of us could come up with. So, you know, as we shine brighter here at UCI, whether it's us or with our students. I want to thank you for the conversation, the partnership and helping making Compass what it is today and what we all would like it to be for tomorrow. So until next time, thank you for joining us today.
