(June 3, 2016 – Jennifer Ortega) On May 18, the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP) issued Envisioning the National Postsecondary Data Infrastructure in the 21st Century, a series of policy papers on ways to improve the country’s data infrastructure in postsecondary education. The papers resulted from a working group sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Topics addressed in the papers include fostering state-to-state data exchanges and leveraging employment data to measure labor market outcomes. EDUCAUSE’s own Joanna Grama, Director of Cybersecurity and IT GRC Programs, authored the series paper entitled, “Understanding Information Security and Privacy in Postsecondary Education Data Systems.”
As explained by the working group co-chairs, Archie Cubarrubia, vice provost for institutional effectiveness at Miami Dade College, and Patrick Perry, chief information officer for the California State University Chancellor's Office, in their paper summarizing the series, “Creating a Thriving Postsecondary Education Data Ecosystem,” one “singular, well-planned” system is not available or likely even possible. Instead, they note that the paper series attempts to frame key recommendations for better knitting relevant systems at a variety of levels into an “ecosystem” that can effectively meet the needs of higher education stakeholders as a whole:
Currently, postsecondary data are collected and shared at many levels and locations: at the postsecondary institution, within states, in multistate collaboratives, in privately held databases, and at the federal level. Each of these repositories represents a piece of our national postsecondary data infrastructure. Evolving this infrastructure — a fragmented “system” that somewhat haphazardly collects, aggregates, and reports educational data — into a coordinated ecosystem can greatly enhance our ability to leverage postsecondary data to answer these and other questions to improve student success.
Creating a coordinated ecosystem requires intentional change. Removing existing legal barriers and reducing the burden of data collection can simplify the task of accessing and using data at all levels of collection and reporting. Implementing standardized, common data definitions and formats can not only improve the usefulness of reporting, but also provide datasets able to respond to a multitude of questions. Aggregating postsecondary data to higher levels, including nationally, can provide a backbone structure able to improve student success and close equity gaps. These and other critical improvements comprise the core of recommendations from this paper series. (Creating, p.1)
To review the series, please see:
[https://sites.ihep.org/postsecdata/resources-reports/national-postsecondary-data-infrastructure]
Jen Ortega serves as a consultant to EDUCAUSE on federal policy and government relations. She has worked with EDUCAUSE since 2013 and assists with monitoring legislative and regulatory proposals across a range of policy areas, including cybersecurity, data privacy, e-learning, and accessibility.