I believe that ATD gave us the framework that we needed to make the full transition from an access/enrollment driven college to a college maintaining its commitment to access while focusing on student success through a rigorous review of policies and practices.
It was during the planning year that I saw a total transformation in not only the data we requested but also the shift in how the data was collected, analyzed, presented, and discussed.
For the first time, I saw institutional researchers emerge as leaders in building a student success agenda based on a basic form of analytics. Instead of walking into meetings with reports of raw data, institutional researchers brought forth synthesized reports with some analysis. I knew that we were moving in the right direction when our questions changed from how many to what impact.
A few years later (2011) we also had an opportunity participate in the planning year of Completion by Design, an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Completion by Design introduced our college to the Preventing Loss, Creating Momentum Framework. This framework asked colleges to identify the critical points where we were losing students and to develop strategies to improve student outcomes by understanding student progression from Connection to Entry to Progress to Completion. This framework forces us to once again reconsider the data we were reviewing and the questions we were asking.
During our participation in Completion by Design, Jenkins and Cho (2012) introduced us to a method that community colleges can utilize to understand student progress and outcomes by analyzing student course-taking behaviors to determine when students enter a program of study.
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