Vice Provost for Institutional Research, Planning and Effectiveness Laura Jensen co-leads the SSI’s strategic leadership team with Senior Vice President Rick Miranda. Jensen and the institutional research staff have been key players in keeping CSU’s student success efforts data-informed since 2008.
As part of the Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President, the Office of Institutional Research, Planning and Effectiveness provides vision and leadership to the reporting, institutional research, assessment, strategic planning and accreditation activities of the institution. IRPE’s work focuses on both quantitative and qualitative research methods, multivariate analyses and research design. Jensen and the staff are committed to helping the institution better understand issues surrounding student success, program evaluation, assessment, enrollment, faculty and staff recruitment and retention, and operations through educational research, reporting and data management.
CSU’s student success work has been data-informed from the beginning. Why is that so important?
Jensen: The work of providing the data to inform decisions comes from IRPE Director Heather Novak and our team, and they get all the credit. But student success is a passion of mine, and it is central to everything we do. Even in tight budget times, we’ve always received funding to support student success initiatives and to make them scalable and successful. It’s very important for IR to help inform the strategies that lead to a better experience for students and promote retention and graduation rates. We disaggregate data, too, to provide a depth of understanding that the university needs to make the right decisions.
We disaggregate student retention rates or graduate rates or course-taking patterns, for example. We disaggregate by student demographics to identify potential inequities and provide supports that are more personalized for students who may require it. This also helps us to identify best practices, so we can extract and scale them. We also look at courses with low success rates, and we dig down looking at that course to see if it’s time of day, academic preparation, pedagogy or a combination of factors contributing to the issue. You can turn data into information that is actionable by translating that into bite-size pieces through disaggregation. We have learned it’s really foundational to centering equity when we are able to disaggregate the data to see where the inequities lie.
You were selected to co-chair the Student Success Strategic Leadership Team and serve on the First-Generation University Strategic Leadership Team. How do you see the coordination of your roles between these two initiatives?
Jensen: It provides a level of continuity across the two initiatives, and we are able to make sure we are coordinated so that we are supporting each effort, not stepping on each other’s toes. That overlap of team members allows us to leverage best practices. It’s very intentional. We want to make sure we are incorporating the work of both initiatives into our larger vision.
What are the greatest takeaways you felt came out of the student success work funded by the $9 million grant from the CSU System Board of Governors, distributed over three years? How did that influence this restructuring for SSI and FGUI?
Jensen: We learned a lot in the first year and the next two years that followed. We funded ideas and proposals that had positive impact but, in the end, were not necessarily scalable to an institutional level. We learned we really needed to look at those initiatives that are scalable to have the greatest impact. But it’s provided us with an opportunity to think more broadly. It was a series of great learning moments for us to direct the work moving forward and retention rates did improve throughout the grant.
What lessons have the data taught us about student success?
Jensen: I would go back to the ideas of disaggregating data. The work teams we now have are based on areas where data told us we still needed shoring up, such as around advising, IT support, our curriculum, high-impact experiences and access.
These work teams are very heavily data informed from a variety of different angles. So, if we try a new approach, data allows us to look at that in a meaningful way. Last year we had one of our largest jumps ever in student retention from first fall to the second fall – a 1.4 point increase in the retention rate. That didn’t happen by accident. That’s because we were targeting populations of students and courses that we knew from looking at the data could benefit from additional support.
Additionally, one key piece of information that Heather Novak and the data team put together was a report to put out to frontline folks; it includes, for example, a summary for each college – what support services students are engaged and not engaged in. So, the colleges can focus on the individual students and disaggregation makes that possible.
What do we need to be mindful of moving forward in the desire to achieve unprecedented change?
Jensen: We need to focus on being student-ready. That means staying true to our access mission. It’s critical to who we are. Right now there are only three or four other large research institutions that have a similar admissions rate and higher graduation rate than we do. We are excelling, but it’s really a culture change we seek.
Unless we do more to be student-ready, we are not going to achieve the change we want. Student-ready means meeting a student where they are and how they come in the door to us. For example, if we see a student is admitted but hasn’t taken math for a while, we need to make sure there are additional supports for them. It’s also looking at supporting students outside the classroom: providing financial aid and on-campus employment, for example. We have to know where students are coming from to help them be as successful as possible. We do a holistic review in our admissions process so we try to get them set up with the best support for their particular circumstances.
And we are becoming more focused on the urgency for change as detailed in the Boyer Commission’s report on Equity/Excellence Imperative: a 2030 Blueprint for Undergraduate Education at U.S. Research Universities. It’s about supporting equitable outcomes that are genuinely attainable with the highest quality academic programs we can possibly offer. We are not talking about sacrificing the rigor of our programs. We are setting high expectations for our students and then providing the resources to help them achieve success.
