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.
Transcript
This is the student success council of a local institution. At the last meeting, they discussed plans for their upcoming institutional accreditation.
After reviewing the accreditation criteria, they noted 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 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.
Thomas navigates to the institution’s PDP dashboards and clicks on the Credit Accumulation Rate Institution-Level dashboard, which is one of the early momentum metrics dashboards.
This dashboard reports the percentage of first-year full-time students who accumulate 30 credits per year or part-time students who accumulate 15 credits per year. Research shows that students who accumulate sufficient credits each year are more likely to graduate.
They could lower the threshold to 12 credits for part-time students and 24 credits for full-time students, but they choose to leave it at the 15 and 30 credit criteria, given students should accumulate about 120 credits in 4 years for on-time graduation from the institution.
Since 81% of their first-year students are full time, Thomas applies the Attendance filter to include only full-time students. And because the 2020-21 academic year is not complete, they remove that cohort by deselecting it from the cohort filter.
Reviewing the line chart, they see that the credit accumulation rate in 2014-15 was 46.9%, which means less than half of their first-year full-time students accumulated 30 credit hours. However, in 2019-20, that rate climbed to 62.7%, which was a 15.8 percentage point increase.
Angela, the institution’s Director of Academic Advising, asks if there is a difference in credit accumulation rate by Race/Ethnicity. To answer that question, Thomas applies the Race/Ethnicity dimension and filters the students to Black or African American, Hispanic, and White students since those categories comprise nearly 85% of first-year students.
Looking at the line chart, they see that all three student groups have shown an improvement in their credit accumulation rate with Hispanic students showing the largest increase. In 2014-15, 41.7% of Hispanic full-time students accumulated 30 credits in their first year of college compared to 67.5% in 2019-10 for an increase of nearly 26 percentage points.
In 2014-15, 38.6% of Black or African American full-time students accumulated 30 credits in their first year of college compared to 49.4% in 2019-20 for an increase of nearly 11 percentage points.
Looking at the line representing White students, they see that 55.4% of that population accumulated 30 credits in their first year of college compared to 62.9% in 2019-20 for a 7.5 percentage point increase.
Using these results, Thomas says they can build a convincing narrative showing that a higher percentage of their first-year full-time students are accumulating credit toward on-time completion.
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.
Angela asks if there is a difference in credit accumulation rate by the students’ enrollment type.
Thomas removes the race/ethnicity filter but leaves the Attendance filter set to Full-time. Then, he changes the dimension to Enrollment Type. Hovering over the 2014-15 data point for transfer-in students, they find that 50.5% of that cohort earned 15 credits for part-time students or 30 credits for full-time students. And by 2019-20, that rate had increased to 56.1% for a gain of nearly 6 percentage points.
Then, they look at first-time in college students. In 2014-15, that cohort had a credit accumulation rate of 41.6%, but by 2019-20, that rate had climbed to 66.7% for an increase of 25 percentage points.
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.