Key performance indicators provide higher education institutions with meaningful metrics of progress. Colleges and universities use this information to boost retention rates, increase productivity, and drive change. The data you collect can lead to changes in marketing, financing, classroom structure, curriculum quality, and student and staff performance.
Understanding key performance indicators and which ones will benefit your institution is the first step toward collecting meaningful information. Additionally, this process can help community colleges better understand how they’re performing and what they need to do to attract more students, encourage current students to graduate, and experience higher levels of student satisfaction. Keep reading to discover how to develop key performance indicators for community colleges from Watermark.
KPIs are vital indicators of progress toward a goal or intended result. They 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. Leading indicators detail future success, while lagging indicators illustrate how well you reached results in the past.
To work effectively, KPIs must be 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 positively impact your institution.
Key performance indicators include:
Key performance indicators are essential in higher education, and community colleges can benefit immensely from tracking the critical components. KPIs are organizational insights that set targets and gauge progress. KPIs give administrators insight into critical components of their institution. They can lead to making vital decisions that improve campus life and the student experience. Key performance indicators in education can:
Traditional higher education metrics can’t always provide a complete picture of community colleges because students at these institutions can take various pathways to succeed. These measures fail to capture the value community colleges offer because, compared to traditional four-year institutions, it can be challenging to determine which community colleges are delivering quality services and education.
Quality data will better represent your community college and give incoming students a better picture of your offerings. Additionally, you can better identify where your institution needs to improve and where you’re excelling, so you can set initiatives and portray a more encompassing picture of your community college. From every aspect of your institution, KPIs can move you and your team forward at the strategic level and increase your relevance.
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, faculty reviews, and other datasets 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 measure 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.
Watermark provides assessment and accreditation software to colleges and universities to foster campus improvement and collaboration. We’ve been crafting and refining solutions for more than 20 years, and many institutions have trusted us to deliver innovative solutions that drive change on campus.
At Watermark, data and people are at our center. We know meaningful information leads administrators and decision-makers to identify key metrics and deliver institutional strategies that impact students, faculty, staff, and the community. That’s why we’ve created unique solutions to meet them where they are and help close the gaps they experience.
With our assessment and accreditation software, you can:
Our solutions support continuous improvement. They automate routine tasks and simplify the data collection and review process. Our software allows you to access information that empowers improvement and enables your institution to evolve. You can see our solutions in action by requesting a demo of the software that will benefit your institution.
