Key performance indicators (KPIs) provide higher education institutions with meaningful metrics of progress. Colleges use this information to boost retention rates, increase productivity, and drive change. The data you collect can influence changes in marketing, financing, classroom structure, curriculum quality, and student and staff performance. However, many community college administrators are unsure how to guide the development and implementation of KPIs.
Understanding key performance indicators and which ones will benefit your institution is the first step toward collecting meaningful information. In this guide, you’ll discover how to develop key performance indicators for community colleges.
A KPI is a performance metric you can measure and analyze over time. A KPI differs from a goal, as a goal is what you aim to achieve, while a KPI is what you measure to check you’re achieving it. If your goal is to improve your institution-wide retention rates by 10 percent over the next two academic years, annual institutional, program, and course retention rates are crucial KPIs to measure.
There are two types of KPIs:
Both types of KPIs enable higher education institutions to focus on operational and strategic improvement, create a foundation for decision-making, and set their sights on what matters most.
To work effectively, KPIs must track progress toward goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-oriented. That means setting straightforward goals you can consistently accomplish within a designated time frame. Additionally, your KPIs must be relevant and able to impact your institution’s strategic success.
Key performance indicators are essential in driving success as a community college. They give administrators insight into critical components of their institutional mission, helping to:
Additionally, you can better identify where your institution needs to improve and where it excels, so you can optimize initiatives for your strategic priorities. From every aspect of your institution, KPIs can help ensure your offerings are relevant to student needs and move your institution forward.
Your institution can aim for many beneficial KPIs. The best indicators will be those that need immediate attention or can help you address any pain points you’ve identified. Consider the following community college KPIs:
After understanding the importance of KPIs, the next step for your institution is deciding how to develop them. Your indicators will only be helpful if you know how to use them and what insight you hope to gain. You can create a KPI for student performance, institution success, and other specific initiatives through effective planning.
Your first step in any plan should be to write a strategic plan. Craft a one-page strategy with your team and outline clear objectives. The KPIs you choose should immediately focus your sights and raise questions about how you can solve problems and drive change.
Bounce questions around to establish which ones need your attention and ultimately affect your goals. For example, if you want to discover why many students are transferring or dropping out, questions about instruction quality, academic resources, and tuition costs are likely to arise. Through discussions, you can identify which ideas will drive your goals. This effort will enable your team to think of solutions and provide a foundation for the work ahead.
Describing results begins with evaluating current data and finding the information you still need. At this point, you can identify the KPIs that will help you close this gap and provide the answers you need to reach your goals. Then, you can take the necessary steps to obtain this information and craft more informed decisions.
Knowing what you need is only one part of the challenge. You also need to determine how you will measure your data and when. Finding the correct methodology will be critical if you’re creating brand-new KPIs or want to adjust current ones.
You will eventually need to refresh all the data you collect, so determining how often you want to administer surveys and evaluations, self-assessments, and annual faculty performance reviews will be necessary. To fully grasp the big picture, you will want to collect data often and be able to track trends over time to make accurate predictions. Be upfront with your time about data collection so you can work as a unit to obtain and review your information.
When you create KPIs, it is essential to define threshold levels. You will never accomplish your goals in a single day — you will need to cover ground to get there. Define these levels to encompass all possible key performance indicators. You can determine which resources and tasks you need to allocate.
You can use symbols like the traffic light indicator to define thresholds. Under this model, a green icon will indicate the metric is on-target or better to reach your goals. A yellow icon indicates the metric is average or off-target within an acceptable range. A red icon identifies metrics that are unacceptable and off-target. You will also need an additional icon to identify metrics that are impossible to use due to missing data.
Once you begin data collection, you will need to determine who has access to add or change information and who is read-only. You may need to restrict access to some members of your institution, but this step does not need to be perfect. You can create a scoreboard structure to enable a cross-institutional view and allow regular data input. You will likely need at least half a year to gather meaningful and valuable data, so ensure your data-collection measure can capture information at a sustainable rate.
An effective analysis will be the best way to ensure you make informed decisions. Be sure to monitor your KPIs as you’re collecting them to get a jump on anything that’s not performing the way it should. Share the information with your team and open the floor to discussions about effectiveness. Evaluate which strategies worked and which need improvement. Determine whether you need to adjust your approach or implement a new one.
If you are arriving at inconsistent data and are not seeing the predicted results, reevaluate your KPIs and the measures you took to obtain information. Avoid taking action until you understand what will drive change at your institution.
Everything you’ve done to define KPIs, collect data, and make decisions eventually leads you to the actions you can take to improve your institution. You may need to take remedial action to address problems with short-term solutions. For more significant issues, you will need to implement strategic initiatives that will spark institutional changes.
When it’s time to act, take the following steps:
Even with a strong KPI development process, many community colleges face obstacles when implementing KPIs. Anticipating common KPI implementation challenges can help your institution prepare to overcome them.
Faculty sometimes look at KPIs as bureaucratic boxes to check, missing the relevance of these targets to their daily teaching. This disconnect can lead to a lack of engagement in improving KPIs. Ways to help your faculty connect the metrics to their mission include:
Community colleges collect data across multiple locations — different departments, courses, programs, and information systems. Without a reliable system for integrating these sources, institutions lack a holistic perspective on performance and improvement opportunities. To overcome this challenge, assign central data governance responsibilities to an authority like your strategic planning committee, and use institutional success software to automate data integration.
Some community colleges are not yet using software to track KPIs, while others rely on outdated or limited tools. Upgrading to innovative solutions tailored to higher education contexts can help you gather, analyze, and interpret more KPI data with greater accuracy and efficiency.
Equipped with the right tools, your community college can use KPIs as signposts on the road to realizing your institutional goals. For innovative software solutions tailored to institutions like yours, explore Watermark’s Educational Impact Suite (EIS).
This higher education success tool kit includes all the software your institution needs to:
Our software allows you to access information that empowers improvement and enables your institution to evolve. Request a demo today to see our solutions in action.
