Powering your DEI efforts with data

A focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is vital in higher education today. DEI impacts every corner of campus, and many colleges and universities have DEI initiatives with focuses varying from faculty hiring and retention to student outcomes. Measuring the success of these initiatives, as well as understanding where your institution might improve, can be difficult. However, the right data analytics can offer actionable insights that help you examine and power your DEI efforts. Read on for a few areas of data you might be overlooking when talking about DEI at your institution.

Recruitment and retention

Studies have shown that a focus on DEI in faculty recruitment can impact student outcomes, and that a diverse workforce makes organizations more effective. Ensuring that you’re recruiting and hiring diverse employees is an important first step, but how can you pinpoint where to concentrate your efforts? That’s where the data comes in.

Look at the data

To launch a DEI hiring initiative, the first step is analyzing the available data to understand where your hiring process is breaking down. For instance, if you’re struggling hire more women into the STEM departments at your institution, you might examine the applicant pool. If you’re not attracting any female candidates, you know to concentrate your efforts on sharing the role more widely, or potentially re-writing the position description to remove gender bias. Parse through geographic data about applicants to see which advertising efforts were most successful, and even examine your application process itself—are there points where candidates drop out? How could you rethink those processes?

Examine diversity breakdowns

If your applicant pool is split evenly between men and women, but the women aren’t being hired, you’re facing a different challenge and might consider solutions like blind resume review to remove gender bias during that step of the process. Teams should also be sure to drill down into the specifics, rather than just looking at overall numbers about gender equity or racial diversity. Examine diversity breakdowns by department, college, or role type for a holistic understanding of which parts of your institution need the most support in achieving DEI goals.

Identify retention opportunities

The data can also help you go a layer deeper . Varying departments might be hiring a diverse group of employees, but that won’t make a difference if those employees aren’t staying. Data analytics can reveal pay gaps, employee engagement metrics, and retention information, helping you identify and compare where your DEI strategies are falling short or succeeding.

Faculty and the tenure process

The tenure process at HigherEd higher education institutions is a prominent discussion today. Many articles in this collection by the Chronicle speak about gender and racial inequities and discuss the barriers faced by women and minorities in the tenure process. To know understand what steps your institution could take to build a more equitable tenure process, you must first examine the data to identify if there’s a problem to be solved.

With insights into faculty workload, including research, teaching, and service burdens, you can identify potential bias in service hours or see where faculty might be falling behind on their research hours—and consider extending the tenure clock in some circumstances. The right analytics can tell you if certain tenure and promotion cases take more time to review—perhaps unnecessarily—or if there are departments that have failed to promote qualified candidates. These metrics can help drive strategic decisions about things like implementing anti-bias training or changing an institutional policy about service hours. A digitized faculty platform can help deans and faculty manage and analyze the data and pull out the necessary insights easily.

Retaining and engaging the right students

Just as recruitment isn’t the only challenge faced when building a diverse faculty and staff body, recruiting a diverse student body is only the first step. Retention and engagement for are key to DEI efforts for students at your institution. So how can you harness data to make sure you are offering the right support at the right time and supporting positive student outcomes?

Measuring attrition and student performance in real time—throughout a semester-long class instead of at the end—can help professors offer personalized support to students who are struggling. Such data can also prompt a re-evaluation of the course’s instructional design based on the current needs of students.

Other teams can make use of student data. Advisors can dive deep into student engagement metrics across campus to look for warning signs of a student who is at risk of dropping out or failing and offer resources. They might also discover a student missing a key course that would prevent them from graduating. Most undergraduate students don’t finish their degree in four years, and sometimes the reasons are as simple as a few missing credits or an unpaid overdue fine from the library.

Examining this data, and understanding the support services that can be beneficial for at-risk students, students on financial aid, or first-generation students, can help your institution improve student outcomes with data-backed strategies.

Powering your institution with data across your campus

Often, departments, schools, or teams working across a university might view themselves as independent groups with unique problems. It is true that some challenges are not university-wide, but when your data is connected and analyzed across campus, those insights can reveal shared challenges and help teams come up with solutions that can have cross-campus impact.

A data analytics strategy at your institution can make a difference on every corner of your campus, and now is the time to start building a culture based on analytics and data-informed decisions. Your data tells a story, and you can get your leadership on board if you can get truly actionable insights from the information that your campus already has.

A joint statement about data analytics strategies by the Association for Institutional Research (AIR), EDUCAUSE, and the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) says, “The time to act is now.” It’s important to have an analytics tool that provides real-time insight, integrates with your other systems, and allows you to drill down or see the bigger picture. Don’t wait to build a data analytics strategy—dive in today.

This post was written by Ellie Smith of PeopleAdmin, an innovative platform offering solutions for talent management, academic affairs, faculty, and student outcomes. Learn more about PeopleAdmin.