Donald M. Norris – President Strategic Initiatives, Inc.

Linda Baer – Senior Program Officer, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

We have utilized our conversations with representatives of leading institutional analytics practitioners and vendors to develop some preliminary insights on the state of organizational capacity for analytics in higher education.  The focus has been on how to optimize student success and institutional productivity...

Marc Parry – The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 22, 2010

Kennesaw State University’s new study about retention strategies in online education, soon to be published in the International Journal of Management in Education, suggests that “nothing worked” in reducing online students from dropping out of courses.  But other commentators suggest that other measures that were not tried have proven successful in other settings.

Kimberly E. Arnold - EDUCAUSE Quarterly, Volume 33, Number 1, 2010

This article by Kimberly Arnold from the EDUCAUSE Quarterly provides a fuller description of the development of the Signals program at Purdue University, which enables faculty and students to receive real-time assessments, throughout the semester, of students’ performance in particular courses, normed against past experiences of successful students.  The article discusses how the program has been received and perceived by students.

Clifford Adelman - Institute for Higher Education Policy, November 2009

The research report, The Spaces Between Numbers: Getting International Data on Higher Education Straight, reveals that U.S. graduation rates remain comparable to those of other developed countries despite news stories about our nation losing its global competitiveness because of slipping college graduation rates. The only major difference—the data most commonly highlighted, but rarely understood—is the categorization of graduation rate data. The United States measures its attainment rates by “institution” while other developed nations measure their graduation rates by “system.”

Jennifer Engle and Mary Lynch - National Association of System Heads and The Education Trust, December 3, 2009

In fall 2007, the leaders of two dozen public higher education systems formed the Access to Success Initiative.  With support from The Education Trust, the system heads worked toward the goals of increasing the number of college graduates in their states and ensuring that those graduates are more broadly representative of their states' high school graduates.  This document represents the first report to the public on the progress of that initiative.