By: Jared Colston
At the beginning of August, two members of the SSTAR Lab (myself and Amberly Dziesinski) attended the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) Conference. Initially, I went into the SHEEO conference hoping to better understand the connection between institutions, state agencies, and federal policy when it comes to creating and improving our public postsecondary systems. I specifically wanted to know how improving data and research infrastructure and capacity can improve student outcomes overall.
SHEEO is a national association designed to support higher education executive offices, such as the Minnesota Office of Higher Education, or the Universities of Wisconsin. The central association works to support their members—and the higher education community as a whole—by convening policy working groups and producing research on higher education at the state level. For example, one of the most popular reports by SHEEO is the State Higher Education Finance (SHEF) report, which documents funding levels and expenditures by public institutions and state legislatures every fiscal year.
Each year, SHEEO hosts a higher education policy conference where their members, along with researchers and policy folks from universities and non-profit organizations, meet to discuss pressing issues related to state and federal higher education policy. In particular, SHEEO highlights the discussions around building, sustaining, and strengthening their public systems of higher education through financial, policy, and practical approaches. The conference was in Washington, D.C., and there was a great mix of people from state administrative offices, statewide longitudinal data system (SLDS) offices, non-profit or think tank organizations, and university researchers.
This year’s conference touched on several pressing issues in higher education, including the connection between higher education and the workforce, micro-credentialing and non-credit enrollment, forecasted “enrollment cliffs” and what to do about them, and new technologies being deployed in higher education—namely artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) approaches to enrollment management. The keynote panels centered on these topics and had leaders of SHEEOs from various states, including Missouri, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, speak to how they were currently addressing them. Oftentimes, the keynote panels blended these topics together in interesting ways; for instance, the keynote on higher education and the workforce addressed micro-credentialing as a means to reduce response time between education and labor market outcomes, while also speaking to how they were targeting these programs at post-traditionally aged potential students to account for the high school “enrollment cliff.” Further, two of the SHEEO speakers discussed using software tools such as Lightcast to have real-time labor market data to better inform their programs.
My personal favorite concurrent session was presented by the Council on Postsecondary Education (CPE) in Kentucky, where the directors of Kentucky’s SHEEO discussed differing levels of research and analysis capacity at their regional public universities and community colleges, with an emphasis on serving the Eastern, Appalachian part of the state. As motivation for their work, they highlighted how data analytics can help improve student retention and success efforts, but only two research institutions (the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville) in the state have that kind of capacity. Their work was a great example of connecting research to practice and gave rise to a great discussion around practice-informed data tools.
Beyond being a professional development opportunity for Amberly and myself, attending the SHEEO conference was useful for SSTAR Lab because of the many sessions discussing improved data infrastructure for the purposes of both policy and research. Hearing how other people address issues around making data-driven decisions by ensuring high quality state data systems was helpful for thinking through how the lab can best frame our approach to data and research broadly. Additionally, the professional contacts we both made during the course of the conference were a great first step to future collaborations on how best to serve our students and public institutions.
The SHEEO conference reinforced the idea that now, more than ever, collaboration within higher education systems is essential for student success. To learn more about how the SSTAR Lab is incorporating collaboration into our work, please read the recent post by our director, Dr. Nicholas Hillman, on the research-practice partnership (RPP) model we have established with the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Enrollment Management.