Q&A: How Data Intelligence Drives Student Success at Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education

EDTECH: Now that you just’ve laid the foundations for governance and evaluation, are you able to spotlight any early successes? What have you ever been taking a look at, and what’s subsequent?

GREENSTEIN: We now have this data-driven culture and these vast data resources, and we are able to quickly present college students with some highly effective and revolutionary instruments to plan their educations and careers. College students can have extra info to assist them determine what programs to take, the common time to finish a level, the projected prices and extra.

I used to be simply in contact with Slippery Rock University, and it has had some large progress in scholar persistence, significantly amongst low-income college students and college students of coloration. Indiana University of Pennsylvania has proven large enhancements, and now you can see the fruits of its labors. Issues go gradual, and typically they dip, however then there’s that hockey stick trajectory that you just dream about and hope for, and it appears to be starting to occur.

EDTECH: What robust choices did it’s important to make?

GREENSTEIN: Integrating from 14 to 10 universities was pushed by the truth that PASSHE didn’t wish to create schooling deserts. The monetary impacts are big. The query grew to become, how can we maintain reasonably priced, viable tutorial exercise in support of students and their communities? We’re solely a few years in, and there’s much more to do, however that is still our goal.

We made a serious shift as a part of our total system redesign, which had two objectives: The short-term objective was to stabilize the system financially; the long-term objective was to provide extra credentialed adults inside the state of Pennsylvania. Many of today’s jobs require some postsecondary education, which about half of adults within the U.S. have. As a result of we’re a system of public, state-owned universities, we play a giant half in that.

To try this, we engineered a elementary shift in our governance, away from a compliance-driven, centralized method to vertical accountabilities, the place the board mentioned, “These are our priorities: student success and monetary sustainability,” they usually recognized these particular priorities, their measurements and board-approved metrics. There aren’t that lots of them. However then we requested our college presidents, “What are you going to do to advance these priorities, and the way will presidents work along with the chancellor to assist progress and maintain one another accountable for it?” Actually, I consider the presidents as companions within the design and execution of our system strategies. The horizontal accountabilities between them —between their universities — and their work collectively as a form of networked enchancment group are elementary components of the entire accountability construction. That’s now baked into our cloth.

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That has contributed as a lot or much more to the system’s efficiency enhancements than the extra conventional vertical accountabilities that run between the colleges and the board, which builds a wide range of incentives and, frankly, disincentives that drive efficiency towards these common, native objectives.

There’s all the time extra to do on monetary stewardship and stabilization, after all, whereas we’re on that, however I believe what’s so thrilling is that we’re able now to speed up into and spend money on that second, longer-term a part of the redesign technique, which is targeted on credentialing and productiveness. That’s thrilling.

If you happen to had mentioned to me in 2018, “In an effort to get to that facet, you’re going to must spend a boatload of time on foundational drains and bathrooms, fixing a bunch of stuff,” I in all probability wouldn’t have come right here as chancellor. Rebuilding the muse isn’t horny, however you’ve got to go slow in order to go fast. If you happen to don’t have the basic issues in place — governance, accountability, mechanisms that drive and assist aligned motion, the expertise infrastructure, the command of your information — something you do on the innovation, credentialing or productiveness aspect is simply going to be one little boutique factor. To do it enterprisewide, in a fashion that’s really in a position to have impression, that’s thrilling. And we’re seeing outcomes.