Data and information

What if higher education leaders had more actionable data to help continually improve pathways for their students? What if state and federal policymakers had better measures to gauge how taxpayer dollars were being spent and the impact on student outcomes? What if students had better access to information that helped them make timely decisions about their path to a certificate or degree?

We are committed to a comprehensive data strategy that ensures efficient, consistent, and transparent collection and reporting of key performance metrics to enable students, institutional leaders, and policymakers to make informed decisions about the value of different postsecondary pathways. 

Postsecondary Value Commission

What is college worth? And for whom? These questions were on Americans’ minds before COVID-19, and now more than ever. The foundation is supporting the work of a diverse group of institutional leaders, policymakers, researchers, students, and advocates to help answer these questions and propose actions to make value more widespread—and equitable. 
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Data Infrastructure

Leveraging data reported regularly by colleges and universities into useful information is critical to ensuring that more students have access to and succeed in higher education. However, the current national postsecondary data infrastructure, with its component systems built for different purposes and owned and operated by different entities, is increasingly inadequate to meet the needs of the higher education community.Turning this fragmented infrastructure into a simpler and better coordinated system can greatly enhance our ability to leverage postsecondary data to answer important questions and improve student success.

Investment Priorities

Our grantmaking in this area focuses on strengthening the metrics available to gauge equitable student outcomes and institutional performance; the systems for gathering and reporting those metrics; and policies and practices around using those metrics to take action. Our priorities seek to:
Increasing the capacity of institutions
Increase the capacity of colleges and universities to connect data sources across campus so that faculty, advisors, and college leaders have access to better and more timely information to help students.
Making the case for the value of postsecondary education
Introduce metrics about the value of postsecondary education that will advance the completion movement to focus on post-completion outcomes and equity.