Data with Purpose: Benchmarking to Demonstrate
the Value of a College Education

00:38Thank you for joining me today for another episode of Data Stakes, where I have conversations with professionals who work directly in the institutional research or effectiveness field, or are data-adjacent in their role in higher education. Today's conversation will focus on something every campus needs: benchmarking data. My guest today is Michelle Taylor, Senior Research Analyst at the National Community College Benchmarking Institute. And I'm very proud to share that both of my previous institutions were members of their National Community College Benchmarking Project. Michelle, thank you for sharing your time to tell our listeners about the Institute and the NCCBP. We might have some listeners who are unfamiliar with the history of the project — why it was started, who led it in the early days, how many members. Can you share more details with us?

01:33Sure. The National Community College Benchmarking Project started from an institutional research office at a two-year institution, Johnson County Community College, and we are still hosted by that institution — we're very grateful for that. It started back in 2004, when our founder, Jeff Seybert, saw a need for two-year institutions to have access to benchmarking data. There are lots of different sources of benchmarking data today, but not so much back in 2004. He worked with two-year institution experts across the country to develop the different benchmarks, and we still use the majority of what he developed. It always amazes me that the data he picked to benchmark is still the data that's relevant to two-year institutions today. It's lasted more than 20 years — he had a lot of foresight. He was recognized by the Association for Institutional Research with the John Stecklein Distinguished Member Award, I believe back in 2015, for all of the work he did leading the way for institutional research and using benchmarking data throughout the country.

02:59Yes. And just on a personal note, Dr. Seybert was someone my institution sent me to visit when I first started my role. He couldn't have been more supportive — providing me with access to his staff, and documents and reports that he encouraged me to model my own after. It was a significant moment at the beginning of my career, when I felt very shaky in what I was doing.

03:29I was very fortunate that even though he had retired by the time I started working at the Benchmarking Institute, he was still consulting with us. So we got to have lots of conversations, as I was learning the benchmarking project myself, about why he selected the benchmarks he did and how to interpret them. There are still days I wish I could reach out and ask him those questions, although he's no longer with us.

03:59Yeah. So Michelle, who is the benchmarking project a good fit for?

04:05Really, it's a good fit for any two-year institution — that's who we focus on, and who we were developed for. We work with everyone from large institutions with numerous people in their institutional research office to new, small institutions. One came in just last year with no dedicated institutional research people — just their vice president of academic affairs and a couple of other folks who wanted to become more data-informed in their decision-making. They jumped in, found the different data, participated, and did a great job. One of the unique things about our project is that you provide the data you want to be benchmarked on. We have a whole host of things institutions can benchmark themselves on, but you select what data you want to provide and what benchmarks you want to get back, so you can really tailor it to your institution. That's why I think it's relevant for the majority of two-year institutions, even if you're very small and don't have dedicated data people.

05:22Yes, totally agree. At both of my institutions I was a one-woman show, and I always appreciated the flexibility you're referring to — the ability to submit only the information we really needed in the years when I was swamped, and to contribute more benchmarks in other years. So it's really a great fit for everyone. Listeners, if you're at a small institution, please don't think this wouldn't be a good fit for you. I think that flexibility makes it an even better fit for small IR offices.

06:04And I'll just add — across our 20-plus-year history, we've worked with over 500 different two-year institutions. A lot of times someone will reach out about the benchmarking project, and their institution actually participated historically, but as personnel changed, that awareness was lost. So if you're interested, reach out, because your institution might have participated before — we still have 20 years' worth of data in our database, and if you participated, you have access to it.

06:40Right. You told me in an earlier conversation that around 95 percent of your current membership completes the traditional metrics module. Can you talk about the metrics involved, and why it's so frequently selected?

06:57Great question. The traditional module is what we started with back in 2004, and it continues to be our flagship. I think most people participate in it because it was designed to be comprehensive and touch all the different parts of a two-year institution — at least the credit portion. We have the student outcome and student success measures everybody is held accountable to these days, but we go beyond that. I like to say we measure the inputs so you can impact the outputs. In addition to completion and transfer rates, we use non-traditional ways of measuring student outcomes — not just the IPEDS-defined cohort, but everybody a two-year institution serves in an academic year, regardless of whether they're first-time, and what their outcomes are. We gather data from external sources, like student engagement summary scores from Ruffalo Noel Levitz or CCSSE. We follow students through their college experience: core academics like math and English, developmental education, early momentum metrics, even a deep dive into concurrent high school programming, since so many students are doing dual credit and bringing those classes with them. We also look at HR — staffing, part-time and full-time instructors, retirements, departures — and we calculate a cost per credit hour for delivering the academic side. We have a module that measures that at the discipline level, a proxy for program level, and we've introduced some of that into the traditional module. Then there's student services staffing in key areas like advising and testing, and how that impacts student outcomes, plus a range of financial data. With all of that together, you can start to see how things like advising staffing impact early momentum metrics, and how early momentum metrics impact student outcomes. You see those relationships in the data, and you can use them to make decisions and take action to improve outcomes.

09:47Right — it is a comprehensive view. If you see your retention slipping, you can easily go to the DFW metrics and early momentum metrics to see if there are changes there. It's one we always did at both of my institutions. Let's talk about a few of the other modules available to members that touch on some of the hot topics in higher education today. First up, tell me more about your enrollment management module.

10:25The enrollment management module is really important today, especially as we've hit the enrollment cliff and everybody's vying for the same — or fewer — students. It has two components. The first is enrollment tracking, a real-time data collection and reporting process. We start asking you to report your data 140 days out from your fall census date, and 100 days out in the spring. At each point in time, you report both headcount and student credit hours for this year and last year, so we can tell you whether you're up or down compared to the same point last year. Most institutions are probably already doing that, though not all. But it's intended to help you answer the next question: we're up five percent compared to last year — how does that compare to everybody else? You get a national comparison, so you can say nationally everyone's up two percent and we're up five, so we look good. But you can also add a peer group — and maybe your peers are up seven percent. So you're ahead of the national average but a little behind your peers, and you have that in real time, with the opportunity to try to impact it before the semester starts. The second part, which we introduced through a student services module and have since tailored specifically to enrollment management, takes a deeper dive into key areas like recruitment, financial aid, and testing — five or six key benchmarks in each area that can help as you develop your enrollment plans for the next semester or year.

12:44Really smart. And you're right — not everyone is capturing that on a daily basis or even has the ability to, so getting it into your project is a great way to make up for that gap. Many community colleges also need a better understanding of return on investment, and the Institute offers the Cost and Productivity Project for researchers interested in analyzing academic program costs. Tell me more about that module.

13:18The Cost and Productivity Project has also been around for more than 20 years; it was developed alongside our traditional collection. It takes a deep dive into the academic side — and you can now do the same for student services and administrative services — looking at the cost of instruction. We use CIP codes as a proxy for programs. Everybody wants to know their program cost, but take a physical therapist assistant program: there's math and other gen-ed requirements in it that the PTA dean or department head doesn't own. So the project measures the parts your discipline is responsible for, and math and English costs roll up to the people who actually make decisions about them. What you get is a cost per credit hour of instruction — direct costs like instructor salaries and benefits, plus non-personnel program costs, because in the health sciences, for example, equipment is very costly compared to a math or English class. Ultimately you get your cost per credit hour of, say, a registered nursing program, with a national comparison. Then there are productivity measures: if you seem to be more expensive than the national or peer average, you can look at your distribution of full-time faculty, part-time faculty, and what we call "other" — an IR person or a dean who still teaches a class. Full-time faculty tend to cost more than part-time adjuncts, so you might use full-time faculty for specialty classes that take advantage of their expertise and an adjunct for an intro class, or think about how to backfill a position when someone retires. It's not intended to say you have too many instructors — it's about using your resources more smartly. You also get your student-faculty ratio, a proxy for class size, so if costs run higher than average, maybe you offer three sections of a course instead of four. It's really a resource allocation tool: understanding your costs and helping you manage them. And I'm super excited — last year we pulled in external labor market data. We use O*NET for national and state data, and we pulled in service-area data from each state resource we could find. For each CIP code, we tie in the occupations that fall under it, with projections for growth — both percentage and number of jobs — wage information, including entry-level and average wages, and typical education levels. So you can see how your costs align and what the labor market outlook says, and use that to make programming and curriculum decisions. We try to bring in as much external data as we can to help members use benchmarking data to make decisions at their institutions.

18:27That's what it's all about. Let's talk about a type of analysis some campuses struggle with because of small staffing, or the difficulty of integrating internal and external data — exactly what you're doing with the Cost and Productivity Project — and that's understanding the value of a certificate or degree in relation to wages earned after graduation. The Institute offers a workforce training and non-credit education module. Who is choosing to participate in this type of data collection, and what does it offer them?

19:07Our workforce module covers both credit career and technical education and non-credit workforce education, and we're trying to measure the different aspects of delivering it, as well as the outcomes. Institutions can successfully give us information about degrees and certificates. We also have what I still call aspirational benchmarks — information beyond the institution. Lots of people take their CDL or real estate classes and then go get licensed through the state or another entity. Some states have great resources to capture that; some don't. Our goal is to measure career and technical education, including comparing delivery through credit and non-credit, because at some institutions people sit in the very same classes, some for credit and some not, while at others they're completely separate. There's no standardized way in the non-credit or workforce world to deliver this type of education, so we're trying to provide measurements that help colleges understand the cost of doing it, the involvement of students in their community, and the successful outcomes of those students.

20:44This is really important. There was always a little bit of panic every time federal leaders at IPEDS started talking about a non-credit data submission, because that data is housed in so many systems — or maybe still on paper. It's very hard to pull all of those strings together.

21:06Yeah, there's no standardized way right now for people to measure their non-credit programs. So we're trying to provide that, and align it with what they measure on the credit side so they have those comparisons.

21:22Yes. Let's end by telling listeners where they can meet you at upcoming fall or spring events, and why they should start planning now to attend the 2027 benchmarking conference, June 8–10, 2027.

21:39First of all, if you're interested, go to our website, nccbp.org. It gives you a comprehensive view of all the benchmarks we offer, and there's a participation map so you can see whether your institution has participated historically. We also always have webinars available — there's a button for those. In terms of seeing us, we're out and about a lot. Coming up in the next couple of weeks, we'll be at CATYC in St. Louis. We'll be at Southern AIR in Little Rock in October, and at NCWE — the National Council for Workforce Education, which looks at both the credit and non-credit side of workforce education — also in October, in Palm Springs, California. We'll be presenting at the SACSCOC Annual Meeting in December. Then in the spring we try to be at Innovations, the AIR Forum, and AACC — those submissions are still pending. And as Debbie said, we host our own conference in the Kansas City area, right in the middle of the country, so hopefully it's easy for everybody to get to. We host it in June here at Johnson County Community College. It's for both users of our data and people who just want to learn more about benchmarking — you don't have to be a member to come. We have all sorts of attendees, from institutional research to student services, and several presidents have attended. It's mainly members and others talking about using benchmarking and other data on their campuses to make decisions, so it really shows you the action side — what you can take back and do with this data at your institution. I've been told it's a great learning opportunity, with lots of hands-on, practical things attendees can apply at their institutions. We'd love to have you be a part of it.

24:08Yes — plus you can create great relationships with people who will respond to your email when you have questions. I know from personal experience that it's a conference where you have the opportunity to get to know people better than at some of the larger national events.

24:29And it's just for two-year institutions — there aren't a lot of conferences that focus only on two-year folks, so it's a chance to connect with them.

24:38So true. Michelle, I've known you for a long time, and it's always great to sit down and learn more about the National Community College Benchmarking Project. Thank you again for spending time with me today. You're always so enthusiastic about data and how it can be used to create meaningful analytics that help community colleges meet accreditation standards and demonstrate the value of a college education.

24:53Thank you for having me.

24:55And to our listeners, thanks for joining us for another episode of Data Stakes. Data Stakes is sponsored by the Data Analytics Alliance for Higher Education — visit our website to learn more about our upcoming quarterly meeting. If you have any questions about today's conversation, don't hesitate to reach out to me at dphelps@datatelligent.ai.