Elise, her two-year institution’s Student Success Council, and the Hispanic Community Coalition meet to discuss progress against their institution’s strategic plan to recruit and serve a student body that reflects the racial and ethnic diversity of the community they serve.
This session is intended for post-secondary institutions active with the Postsecondary Data Partnership.
Transcript
Five years ago, a local 2-year institution adopted a new strategic plan. One of the goals was to recruit and serve a student body that better represents the racial and ethnic diversity of the community they serve, which is approximately 18% Hispanic and growing.
Recently, the local Hispanic Community Coalition reached out to Elise, the provost, to ask if the institution was meeting that goal.
Luckily, the institution participates in the Postsecondary Data Partnership, or PDP. As part of that participation, the institution has opted into the Student Insights Dashboard, which is a public-focused version of the PDP.
Elise invited the Hispanic Community Coalition to meet with her and the Student Success Council.
During the meeting, she shows them how to navigate to the Student Insights Dashboard, where … she selects the Enrollment dashboard, and then selects her institution.
Overall, the first-year enrollment in 2015-16 was 1,639. In 2020-21, the first-year enrollment was 1,400, a decrease of 239 students.
Looking at the stacked bar chart, they see that the decline in first-year student enrollment is largely due to a significant drop in transfer-in students.
Because the Coalition is interested in Hispanic student enrollment, Elise applies the Race/ethnicity filter to only include Hispanic students. Looking at the stacked bar chart, the enrollment of Hispanic students rose from 130 students in 2015-16 to 154 students in 2020-21. After looking at the 2015-16 and 2020-21 cohort sizes, she highlights that the proportion of Hispanic first-year students for the total cohort rose from 8% in 2015-16 to 11% in 2020-21.
Next, the Hispanic Community Coalition wants to know the graduation rates of the Hispanic students.
Elise navigates back to the Student Insights Dashboards home page, clicks on the Outcomes dashboard, and then selects her institution.
First, Elise applies the Race/Ethnicity filter to include only Hispanic students. Then, because many of students attend college part-time, she changes the “Outcomes at” filter from two-years to three years. One of the Coalition members asks why the 2019-20 data point disappeared. Elise explains that because sufficient time hasn’t passed for the 2019-20 cohort to have completed, there is no data yet to display.
Now, they’re ready to look at the data. Hovering over the 2015-16 data point in the line chart, they see the three-year graduation rate of that cohort was 30% and the rate increased almost 9 percentage points by 2018-19.
Another Coalition member asks how that graduation rate compared to the White students at the institution. Elise goes back to the Race/Ethnicity filter and clicks on White students to include them in the dashboard. Then, she adds the Race/Ethnicity dimension to disaggregate the results. Looking at the line chart, they see that, while there is an equity gap between White and Hispanic students, the gap decreased from 17.5 percentage points in 2015-16 to 9.2 percentage points in 2018-19.
Given that rate, Elise and the Student Success Council discuss how they will continue the current efforts of their plan to close the equity gap in about four years.
At the end of the meeting, the Hispanic Community Coalition congratulates Elise and the rest of the Student Success Council on their progress to create a more representative student body and for improving the three-year completion rate of its Hispanic students.
And Elise encourages the Coalition to continue to monitor the institution’s progress using the Student Insights Dashboard.