NACUBO, AIR, and EDUCAUSE's joint statement on analytics argues that colleges and universities should embrace analytics and offers suggestions for doing so effectively, underscoring the importance of protecting privacy at the same time.
When Susan Johnston, president and CEO of the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO), and Christine Keller, executive director and CEO of the Association for Institutional Research (AIR), and I got together in early 2019 to craft a statement to energize campus conversations about analytics, we weren't sure how this would all come together. Yet we were sure of one thing: we wanted to get people's attention. To that end, we wanted to avoid a title like "The Effectiveness of Analytics and Higher Education"—followed (of course) by a colon and more words. Our hope was to contribute a sense of urgency to the consideration of analytics.
In the end, we decided this was a job for hyperbole, and we settled on this: "Analytics Can Save Higher Education. Really."(published in August 2019). We didn't foresee that in the following months, a number of powerful articles would be published, in both the higher education press and the mainstream press, around perils and concerns related to analytics, data tracking, and algorithmic solutions. In the light of these stories, our desire for hyperbole may have created the impression that we were shouting "Full speed ahead!" and "Damn the torpedoes!" precisely at a time when nuance and caution were called for.
Now that we've received some attention, let's point to where that attention should be directed in the coming months. We stand firm in our conviction that analytics is a crucial part of the future of higher education—though never, ever, should analytics be recklessly deployed at the expense of student and staff privacy. In fact, one of the six sections of the statement bluntly reminds us all that "analytics has real impact on real people," stressing simply but clearly that "responsible use of data is a non-negotiable priority."
Our data shows that colleges and universities have not made enough progress in analytics to substantially strengthen higher education.1 NACUBO, AIR, and EDUCAUSE stand firm in our conviction that the technologies we have before us hold the promise to considerably improve the odds that our students will thrive. We stand equally strong in the conviction that analytics and related technologies must be used with the care and caution that our community deserves. We can go carefully, and we can "go big." We must do both.
Notes
- John O'Brien, "Analytics, Interrupted," EDUCAUSE Review 54, no. 2 (Spring 2019). ↩
John O'Brien is President and CEO of EDUCAUSE.
EDUCAUSE Review 55, no. 1 (2020)
© 2020 John O'Brien. The text of this article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.