The Advantage of Historia | Research:
Institutions of higher education are complex cultural and economic structures in which internal and external agents with competing priorities, units, individuals, and ideologies contribute to the fulfillment of colleges’ missions and objectives. Executive leadership often discovers it lacks the ability to understand the cause of undesired conditions or the progress toward desired outcomes due to the ambiguity of perspectives and results.
While presidents and provosts are awash in advice on the nature of the challenges and pitfalls that they face by virtue of their positions, the solutions can focus on the management of messaging, personnel, or board expectations as if educational leadership is more or less a symbolic exercise. Following this line of thought, presidents and provosts may rely on legal, human resource, and marketing experts to parse the ambiguities and deliver positive sound bites to the campus community.
American colleges and universities traditionally serve both civic and market purposes, however, so higher education executives require the principles of good governance and organizational efficiency to serve the institutional mission and deliver students’ success. Moreover, the mounting public criticism of educational outcomes and a more consumerist perspective on college among families increasingly pressure college leaders to evidence that their institutions serve the purposes of higher education effectively and affordably.
Here are our keys to successful executive leadership in 21st-century higher education.
Embrace the Possibility of Continuous Improvement
The challenge of improving the fundamentals of the college’s performance metrics in retention, graduation, or outcomes will be met with skepticism by many in the institution who work with students on a daily basis. That skepticism can easily become the most significant impediment to improvement as staff and operational managers struggle to understand changes to “the way things have always been done.” In addition, campus leaders and mid-level administrators likely will experience a new source of anxiety as the scrutiny of institutional effectiveness measures becomes a routine function of accreditation reports, cabinet meetings, and even employee performance evaluations.
If executives are to marshal local efforts to improve the operations of the institution, their leadership must inspire the student support staff and faculty at the college or university. No doubt, powerful external forces outside of institutional control influence how adaptable or successful the institution may be. The approach of leadership nonetheless is crucial to the establishment of a culture of institutional effectiveness that favors mastery over drift. College enrollments continue to grow across most sectors, but the growth is driven by an underlying population who come as first generation, underrepresented, or low income students. An institution that fails to pursue change and adapt to future college-goers in the United States will find itself unprepared to sustain its current level of success. Continuous improvement is not only possible, it is unavoidable.
Commit to the Transparency of Performance
Executive leadership will not collaborate or hold each other accountable if clear indicators for how well each distinct division contributes to the performance of the institution are not established. Before transparency advances the interest and the mission of the institution, however, the integrity of the data used to inform decision-making and measure performance must be verified. The public discourse and the annual rankings often focus on the same key performance indicators that update only once per year. Those highly-visible indicators are often the best metrics to affirm as reliable and valid, then the institution can shift its attention to progress indicators that update more regularly – on a weekly or monthly basis – for use in dashboards.
After an institution introduces dashboards and scorecards as a periodic subject of discussion for the first time, the cabinet or leadership will go through a period of transition to understand how to read the measures and factor them into data-informed decisions. The presentation of metrics in itself is never sufficient, the dialog must engender understanding and communication between professionals with very different expertise and levels of comfort with research. At this stage, as well, the institution will begin to see to what extent the several divisions operate as “silos” and compensate for the loss of data between their areas or sub-units. Quality assurance reviews to determine where gaps in data sharing occur often serve as team-building exercises that bring disparate, but dependent, units into alignment to work toward the same end: student success.
Uphold the Targets to Measure Accountability
Once an institution affirms the integrity of data and identifies the significant trends in its business model, the research focus must turn to an understanding of the level of change that is within reach. At times, maintaining the same level of performance is a measure of success when the fundamentals of student academic preparedness are expected to decline or the local market witnesses a steep decline in the number of high school graduates. Aspirational targets require clear methodologies that can be communicated to the campus community in a way that build confidence that the proposed transformation is within reach.
Trend analysis and projections serve to lay out a roadmap for an institution’s aspirational goals. Competitive benchmarking with carefully selected peers allows executive leadership to see the potential variance in performance at schools facing similar conditions or upholding similar missions. Strategic planning insights gained from trends and projections then permit executives to create a comprehensive vision for the institution in the near future. Once broadcast to the community as the standards to which continuous improvement will be held accountable, in the final analysis, the institution must commit to routine assessment of the progress toward strategic goals in order to maintain momentum for change.
Assess Outcomes to Leverage Effectiveness
Knowing what levels of performance are within reach differs from knowing how to achieve those aspirational goals. Institutions require the capabilities of effectiveness studies to estimate the impact of intervention initiatives for student success or to recognize if resources must be re-allocated to strengthen new or existing programs for student outcomes. Generally, the implementation of “high-impact practices” does not assure a college or university of the outcomes desired. The size or nature of the impact depends on local characteristics, existing performance levels, and the availability of resources.
Executives are well-served by rigorous and extensive assessment mechanisms that track high-impact initiatives to improve student success and to measure the potential effect of interventions or pilot programs. Annual monitoring and reporting of continuous improvement efforts refine best practices found in the education literature and adapt their benefits to the local institutions. As the institution expands its capabilities to research, plan, and assess continuous improvement, the executives will motivate personnel to become active contributors to the the national effort and literature on student success. Acquisition of grant and other external funding then may establish the institution as a model of innovation and institutional effectiveness.
Summary
The above items represent a brief synopsis of the transformation a college experiences when it choose to participate in the global effort to identify effective educational practices.
None of the above objectives is possible without a commitment to the infrastructure, capacity, and expertise of your institutional research and effectiveness office. Historia | Research works with your assessment and planning personnel as partners and supports your effort to build internal capabilities and resources to sustain long-term success in an increasingly competitive and demanding environment for higher education.