Why Data Is the Most Important Tool for a Higher Education Leader
Tech Tactics in Education speaker Jason Simon shares how colleges and universities can better utilize data to tackle existential challenges and move toward analytic maturity across the institution.
As associate vice president of data, analytics, and institutional research at the University of North Texas, Jason Simon believes in the transformational power of data to improve student and institutional outcomes. This November at the 2023 Tech Tactics in Education conference in Orlando, he will outline how analytic maturity can lay the foundation for higher education institutions to thrive in the "new normal" in his session, "Higher Ed Is in Trouble: How Analytics, Data Literacy, and Data Governance Can Help Save It." We caught up with him to find out what holds institutions back from making use of their data, what the road to analytic maturity looks like, how AI will impact how institutions approach analytics, and more.
 Campus Technology: The title of your session posits that "Higher Ed Is in Trouble." Why?
Jason Simon: Part of it is the reality of shifting demographics: We're seeing shrinking numbers of high school graduates in the vast majority of the United States. There are only three states that are seeing any growth whatsoever. And the mergers, the acquisitions, the campus closures — including some very large historic institutions — all point to the need for institutions of higher education and their leaders to think differently about how they leverage data, analytic maturity, data governance, data literacy, and really start to take advantage of that to help address some of these challenges.
Another factor is the overall student belief in higher education being worth the investment. A recent Gallup poll found that American confidence in higher education is at an all-time low — nearly a 20 percentage point drop compared to eight years ago. There's a burden for institutions of higher education to demonstrate to students, their families, and legislatures the value that they provide in return for the tuition and fees that they charge. Many institutions can't do that because they lack the maturity on connecting their student data with their finance data, with their individual lifetime earnings data, and they're stuck trying to tell a story with major plot lines missing.
CT: What are some common things that are holding institutions back when it comes to using their data?
Simon: The biggest piece that really holds campuses back is not having a clear, articulated executive sponsor behind their data efforts. These initiatives require collaboration across the enterprise to really marshal resources, staffing, and prioritization of activities to improve a data ecosystem.
Second, most campuses haven't done a thorough data audit. They haven't done a data maturity audit. They haven't engaged stakeholders widely and broadly across the institution to understand the complexities of the problems that they're up against.
Data literacy is also a common challenge. Data is, by all accounts, one of the most important tools that we have as an administrator and a leader for institutions of higher education. If it's non-existent, or if it's stuck behind a narrow stovepipe that's not shared very well, or it's governed in such a way where it's not federated and democratized across the institution, then it's really of no value.