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

EDTECH: Now that you’ve laid the foundations for governance and analysis, can you highlight any early successes? What have you been looking at, and what’s next?

GREENSTEIN: We now have this data-driven culture and these vast data resources, and we can soon provide students with some powerful and innovative tools to plan their educations and careers. Students will have more information to help them decide what courses to take, the average time to complete a degree, the projected costs and more.

I was just in touch with Slippery Rock University, and it has had some tremendous growth in student persistence, particularly among low-income students and students of color. Indiana University of Pennsylvania has shown tremendous improvements, and you can now see the fruits of its labors. Things go slow, and sometimes they dip, but then there’s that hockey stick trajectory that you dream about and hope for, and it seems to be beginning to happen.

EDTECH: What tough decisions did you have to make?

GREENSTEIN: Integrating from 14 to 10 universities was driven by the fact that PASSHE didn’t want to create education deserts. The financial impacts are huge. The question became, how do we sustain affordable, viable instructional activity in support of students and their communities? We’re only a couple of years in, and there’s a lot more to do, but that remains our objective.

We made a major shift as part of our overall system redesign, which had two goals: The short-term goal was to stabilize the system financially; the long-term goal was to produce more credentialed adults within the state of Pennsylvania. Many of today’s jobs require some postsecondary education, which about half of adults in the U.S. have. Because we’re a system of public, state-owned universities, we play a big part in that.

To do that, we engineered a fundamental shift in our governance, away from a compliance-driven, centralized approach to vertical accountabilities, where the board said, “These are our priorities: student success and financial sustainability,” and they identified those specific priorities, their measurements and board-approved metrics. There aren’t that many of them. But then we asked our university presidents, “What are you going to do to advance those priorities, and how will presidents work together with the chancellor to support progress and hold each other accountable for it?” In fact, I think of the presidents as partners in the design and execution of our system strategies. The horizontal accountabilities between them —between their universities — and their work together as a kind of networked improvement community are fundamental parts of the whole accountability structure. That’s now baked into our fabric.

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That has contributed as much or even more to the system’s performance improvements than the more traditional vertical accountabilities that run between the universities and the board, which builds a variety of incentives and, frankly, disincentives that drive performance toward those universal, local goals.

There’s always more to do on financial stewardship and stabilization, of course, while we’re on that, but I think what’s so exciting is that we are in a position now to accelerate into and invest in that second, longer-term part of the redesign strategy, which is focused on credentialing and productivity. That’s exciting.

If you had said to me in 2018, “In order to get to that aspect, you’re going to have to spend a boatload of time on foundational drains and toilets, fixing a bunch of stuff,” I probably wouldn’t have come here as chancellor. Rebuilding the foundation is not sexy, but you’ve got to go slow in order to go fast. If you don’t have the fundamental things in place — governance, accountability, mechanisms that drive and support aligned action, the technology infrastructure, the command of your data — anything you do on the innovation, credentialing or productivity side is just going to be one little boutique thing. To do it enterprisewide, in a manner that is actually able to have impact, that’s exciting. And we’re seeing results.