On Thursday July 22, 2010, the College Board hosted a convening of education leaders to address now ongoing concerns about college attainment rates in the United States. They have followed a long train of education stakeholders including Grantmakers for Education, the National Governors Association, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Obama Administration that have shined intense light on the college attainment deficits in the US. Like nearly all education and social challenges, the causes are multidimensional and the parties necessary to solve the problems are equally broad and varied. 

For Mission Measurement clients focused increasing college going and improving college success rates have realized that 1) program design needs to be designed and executed in order to achieve the organization’s desired college access and success outcomes, and 2) a measurement plan needs to acknowledge these program realities and keep track of individual students and their progress and growth for the duration of the program and beyond. 

While our work has always started with a client-critical measurement challenge, we have more recently extended our focus on program design questions that arise from the data. We start with a modification to a typical measurement question by extending into program design: How can an organization retool existing programs and recast existing resources in order to better accomplish their stated outcomes? There is a wealth of data available on effective college access programs, much of which is available through the Effective Practices in Student Success database  and through comprehensive program listings at the National College Access Network website and the Pathways to College Network.  In our experience, many in the field are happy to share programmatic details as well and online forums and conferences hosted by some of the aforementioned organizations are valuable grounds for program strategy sharing. 

With respect to data, some important work in the area of performance measurement for college access and success programs has already been done by the OMG Center for Collaborative Learning. In their July 2009 report, Using Data to Drive Change, the authors cite several strategies for measuring performance for college access and success stakeholders. In particular, several tools and resources are shared in the Appendix for organizations pursuing comprehensive data strategies for college access and success programs.  

In upcoming thought scraps, we’ll be sharing more of our client experiences with performance measurement as applied to the field of college access and success and are launching new research regarding approaches to performance measurement in the college access and success space. Our initial research stage will involve conducting interviews with college access and success programs that have pursued performance measurement approaches and complementing those findings with work with our existing clients who work in this field. We are energized by the attention these issues are getting nationally and in local communities and hope to be part of the solution going forward.