June 7, 2013

Putting Big Data to Work

Jun. 7, 2013 at 08:00 AM | By Peter Cookson | Comment Count

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives approved legislation to establish a variable interest rate for student loans—a move by Republicans and some Democrats to avoid doubling rates in July or delaying this decision until the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (HEA). Addressing loans now seems like a reasonable move, given that education insiders recently predicted that HEA will not be reauthorized until at least 2015.

But what stuck out to me about the House’s activity last week, was the passed Improving Postsecondary Education Data for Students Act, which proposes to create an advisory committee to “review existing federal, state, institutional, and private-sector transparency initiatives to determine the information that is most helpful to both traditional and non-traditional students, including student veterans.” The committee will be tasked with making a recommendation on whether college graduates’ earnings should be considered a measure of institutional quality. This bill doesn’t come as a surprise—the President and members of Congress have been calling for increased transparency in higher education for several years now. But, the lack of action is puzzling.

Luckily, the education sector’s quest for better, consumer-facing data is moving much faster than Congress. As my Whiteboard colleagues have noted, we are seeing dramatic efforts to organize and analyze data in both K12 and higher education. States are collecting longitudinal student information from kindergarten to college, massive amounts of information are being captured and analyzed to improve institutional productivity, and nonprofits like inBloom are working to build data platforms that allow innovators to create new tools that tackle instructional challenges.

All this reminds me of a recent conversation I had with Todd Bloom, chief academic advisor at Hobsons. We sat down to talk about student engagement and higher education accountability, but you cannot get far in those conversations without a discussion around the advantage educators, parents, and students can have if we had better insight into how students learn and progress through their educational career. Like many innovative companies that interact with students, Hobsons is generating a fascinating amount of student learning and behavioral data. For example, Naviance eDocs transferred 13.3 million high school student records during the 2011-12 school year. The challenge is how to collect that data, connect it with other student-specific insights, and then share it with educators in an actionable way. (Check out Hobsons higher education president Todd Gibby’s reflections for more on the challenges.)

Other sectors are further along in wrangling big data than education is, and they provide proof that it can be done. Todd cites Capitol One as a savvy example of an organization that is doing all it can to better understand its customers, and thus enhance its service to them. Capitol One, the sixth largest bank, has built out a data and analytics shop of over 900 highly-skilled analysts and scientists. Their size of investment in “big data” signals how important this kind of insight is to their work.

For those of us in the business of improving educational outcomes for children, the onus is on us to put this influx of educational data to work.

This entry was first featured on the Whiteboard Advisors Blog, published on May 28, 2013.

Interested in how Big Data is shaping education? Read Hobsons Higher Education President Todd Gibby's series on Big Data, Big Opportunities, Big Challenges.