CSULB’s Data Fellows program empowers The Beach to lead
What good is an abundance of data if it can only be understood — and accessed — by a few experts?
That’s precisely the question CSULB leaders puzzled when they set out to develop the Data Fellows program, a critical university community that comes together to explore and study student success metrics in ways not previously possible.
The program attracts participants from across campus— with the academic colleges, Academic Senate, Graduate Studies, the Center for International Education, the Division of Student Affairs, and many more among the groups represented each year — who research their success trends. Faculty members explore new research and scholarship opportunities through their engagement in the Data Fellows projects, and several colleges have created new staff positions dedicated to data analytics to support student success. Some college teams have also taken on meaningful long-range plans to study and track progress in their student success initiatives.
A novel and collaborative approach to solving student success challenges, Data Fellows prepares employees to become experts, teaching them how to harness available institutional data to solve student success challenges.
“We teach Data Fellows how institutional data is defined, where to access it, and how to use it to tell a compelling story,” said Mary Anne Rose, Interim Director of the Student Success and Advising Center in the College of Education and co-director of Data Fellows. “This empowers them to make data-driven decisions at all levels, whether by individuals, departments, or campus-wide.
“Beyond digging into the data, the Data Fellows program creates a platform for cross-departmental collaborations that break down silos, encouraging a more integrated approach to addressing institutional challenges.”
By expanding access to information on student persistence, retention, graduation, and other metrics, the program aims to foster a culture of data ownership at CSULB, and encourage a broader understanding and application of this knowledge on campus and beyond.
To support this effort, the Office of Institutional Research and Analytics (IR&A) has restructured significantly to cater to the increased volume of new data requests and provide greater control over existing datasets, reflecting a change in culture in the department that "is equally important and critical to support the increase in appetite for more customized datasets to support a very wide range of needs,” said Dhushy Sathianathan, Vice Provost for Academic Planning, who spearheaded the creation of Data Fellows in 2015.
“Customizable data to meet the needs of individual faculty and staff is critical to improving student success in a meaningful way.”
This shifting mindset around data availability and personalization “is an uncharted road with new opportunities and challenges,” Sathianathan added. “It is no longer enough for an institution to rely solely upon data specialists working in silos.”
“An understanding of the value of data to all institutional endeavors, particularly as related to student success, must be perceived. It is not sufficient simply to focus on exposing, collecting, storing, and sharing data in the raw. It is what we do with it and when we act on it that counts.”
The program consists of annual cohorts of faculty and staff, who spend the year engaged in research projects, exploring challenges for which they’ll need university data to solve. While they research throughout the year, a data-savvy planning team member is assigned to guide their progress, ensuring they ask the right questions and collect relevant insights. The fellows are also taught how to use data tools like pivot tables, visualizations, and graphs to support their projects, and some even pick up more complicated skills like how to utilize the software Tableau.
Each cohort is comprised of teams leading about 10 projects over the course of the academic year. Twice per month, the entire cohort comes together to explore broad higher ed challenges, engage in data-focused lessons, and collaborate on their projects. The year culminates in a final symposium, where teams present their projects and findings in a poster event open to the campus community.
“When data fellows launched in 2015, we were building on our strong tradition of data-driven leadership,” said President Jane Close Conoley. “We were bringing together — for the first time — faculty and staff who would be empowered to explore various data sources and, using that data, develop actionable projects to address important student-success questions at both the unit-specific and university-wide levels.”
Now, 10 years after the program’s launch, Data Fellows “has provided a growing number of faculty and staff a sense of ownership of previously siloed knowledge and of data-driven solutions,” she said.
The initiative also contributes to the broader strategic mission at CSULB of promoting intellectual achievement on the campus and beyond, she said, “anchoring a collective, university-wide focus on student success.”
In the decade since the program’s launch, many institutionally impactful initiatives have spurred from Data Fellows, including Beach XP, CSULB’s learning community program for first-time, first-year students that aims to improve student retention. Another is the Provost’s Graduation Incentive Award, which offers incentives for students to finish their degree over the summer instead of delaying graduation until the fall. The latter stemmed from a Data Fellows project that aimed to improve four-year graduation rates.
These and every Data Fellows project’s insights are meaningful not only because they hold institutional impact potential, but also because they contribute more information to CSULB’s growing repository of useful university data.
“The Beach community is well prepared to navigate the challenges of student success,” Sathianathan said. “The decisions we make are more impactful because we have a large community of faculty and staff who are data informed.”
