Follow the Student Success Counsel at an institution as they use the Postsecondary Data Partnership dashboards to research and respond to the student success sections of the upcoming institutional accreditation report.
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Transcript
This is the Student Success Council of a local 4-year institution. At the last meeting, they discussed plans for their upcoming institutional accreditation. After reviewing the accreditation criteria, they note that they are required to report student success metrics for some of the criteria. While the institution has improvement plans in place to impact long-term institutional metrics like completion rate, given these plans were instituted last year sufficient time has not passed to see any impact yet. However, there is evidence that the institution will show improvements in long-term student success metrics if they focus on short-term or leading metrics. Improvements in these leading indicators should translate to improvements in long-term student outcomes or lagging indicators like completion. These indicators can also be more immediate indicators that a plan is not working as intended and if adjustments might be needed.
So what are these leading indicators? Early momentum metrics are leading indicators of long-term outcomes like completion. The Postsecondary Data Partnership or PDP features three dashboards focused on early momentum metrics. Credit accumulation rate provides information on the percentage of students accumulating sufficient credit for on-time completion. Credit completion ratio measures the ratio of credits completed to attempted. And Gateway course completion rate identifies the percentage of students completing required math and or English Gateway courses in their first year of college.
Nicole says in our accreditation report we can focus attention on these early momentum metrics and Thomas agrees. First, they navigate to the credit accumulation rate dashboard. This dashboard has two unique filters. The student success team decides to leave the credit threshold set to "15 part-time and 30 full-time" and academic year set to "one", which filters the dashboard to include part-time students who accumulated 15 credits in their first year of college and full-time students who accumulated 30 credits in their first year of college. Because their accreditation report is focused on first-time students, they need to set a filter to do that. Thomas clicks on edit, which opens chart settings. Then he clicks on enrollment type and deselects "transfer-in". Then clicks apply settings.
Now the dashboard shows first-time students only. Angela notes that improvement efforts for first-time students began during the 2020-21 academic year so they should focus their attention starting in that year. They decide to remove the prior cohort years. To do that, Thomas clicks on edit, which opens chart settings. Then he clicks on cohort and deselects "2017-18", "2018-19" and "2019-20". Then he clicks apply settings.
Now the dashboard represents first-time students for the past three cohorts. The student success team is ready to review the results. Hovering over the 2020-21 data point, they see that 36.5% of that cohort met the credit threshold of accumulating 15 credits for part-time students and 30 credits for full-time students within their first year of college. Hovering over the 2022-23 cohort, they find that value improved to 46.8% for an increase of 10 percentage points. Everyone was excited by the gain in credit accumulation rate.
Then Nicole asked if all students saw an improvement, specifically students of color. To answer that question, Thomas applies the race/ethnicity dimension. To do that, he clicks on edit, which opens chart settings. Then he selects "race/ethnicity" from the dimension drop down and clicks apply settings.
Now they see the chart has a line representing the credit accumulation rate for each race/ethnicity category. Sandra tells them that 92% of their first-time students are represented by four race/ethnicity groups: Asian, black or African-American, Hispanic and white. So Thomas applies the race/ethnicity filter to include just those categories.
Reviewing the line chart, they found that all four student groups improved in their credit accumulation rate with Hispanic students showing the largest increase. In 2020-21, 30.5% of Hispanic first-time students met the credit threshold of 15 credits for part-time students and 30 credits for full-time students compared to 48.4% in 2022-23. This is an increase of 18 percentage points.
Using these results Thomas says they can build a convincing narrative showing that a higher percentage of their first-time students are accumulating credit toward on-time completion compared to prior cohorts. But Nicole reminds him that they need to further explore the disparity in increased credit accumulation rate for different racial groups so they can explain how they are addressing those gaps and Angela asks if there is a difference in credit accumulation rate by first generation student status. Thomas removes the race/ethnicity filter and changes the dimension to "first generation".
Reviewing the line chart, they find that both student populations increase their credit accumulation rate over the three academic years. Continuing generation students improved by 11 percentage points while first generation students improved by 12 percentage points, which closed the equity gap by one percentage point. So for both continuing generation and first generation first-time students, there was an improvement in their credit accumulation rate.
Using results from their PDP dashboards, the Student Success Council starts crafting a response to the student success sections of the institution's accreditation report.