Identifying and Addressing Equity Gaps Across the Education-to-Workforce Continuum
Reflecting on my journey to the SDP Fellowship, I am reminded of the students who have shaped my path. My career in education began as a college advisor with the National College Advising Corps in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There, I helped my students navigate financial, academic, and socioemotional barriers to postsecondary education. I saw the grit and determination needed for students to succeed in education systems that often exclude low-income students and students of color. This experience deepened my commitment to systems-wide change that will help students access and succeed in postsecondary education. After completing my Master of Public Policy at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, I was drawn to the SDP Fellowship for its unique opportunity to leverage the power of data to help education organizations maximize their impact and improve student outcomes.
As a Cohort 16 SDP Fellow, I am placed at the California Student Aid Commission (CSAC) as a Data & Research Specialist. CSAC is California’s principal state agency responsible for administering financial aid programs for students across the state’s public and private colleges, universities, and vocational schools. My work at CSAC is focused on measuring the return on investment of California’s annual $3 billion investment in financial aid. As California faces significant budget cuts, this project will help both policymakers and practitioners understand how the state's various financial aid programs are working to serve California’s diverse student population. This project will leverage multiple data sources, including California’s new State Longitudinal Data System (also called a P20W system), Cradle 2 Career (C2C).
Longitudinal data systems as new opportunities
My work feels particularly exciting now as the expansion of P20W data systems across the country creates new opportunities to identify and address equity gaps across the education-to-workforce continuum. As the higher education community is increasingly called to demonstrate its value, P20W data systems offer researchers powerful tools to provide evidence on how well postsecondary institutions are serving students and aligning with workforce needs. In addition to benefits for researchers and policymakers, P20W data systems are offering students and families increased transparency into their education systems, empowering them to make more informed decisions about their investment in postsecondary education. This increased transparency is especially critical in California, where students navigate the largest public higher education system in the country. The C2C data system offers an exciting opportunity to analyze trends in student movement from K-12 into higher education and beyond. This knowledge is critical to implementing policies and practices that close equity gaps and improve student outcomes.
The SDP Education to Workforce Pathways Diagnostic Toolkit: Moving from Analysis to Action
SDP’s Education to Workforce Pathways Diagnostic training and toolkit are a huge asset in this work, offering both a foundation for my own analytic work in my placement, as well as a roadmap for moving from analysis to action. This fall, SDP’s Institute for Leadership in Analytics offered a workshop called “Pathways to and through College,” which brought together the collective expertise of analysts and researchers from across the country, all of whom are aspiring to use their state's P20W data systems in unique and creative ways. Learning about different states' contexts and the opportunities and challenges they are facing in leveraging their P20W data systems provided new insights for me in my work, and broadened my understanding of how these systems can be used to understand postsecondary and workforce outcomes.
One common and shared challenge amongst workshop participants was data access. Given the varying levels of maturity of P20W data systems, the workshop prompted me to think about how I can leverage existing data while working to fill in gaps that will allow for a more nuanced analysis of postsecondary and workforce trends. In addition to the valuable network of researchers, SDP is utilizing this toolkit across multiple P20W data systems and states, giving them a valuable perspective on strategies and best practices for conducting these analyses in differing contexts (see Georgia here and Washington state here). The toolkit also helped me think beyond analysis to the essential step of translating data into action. The workshop modeled how to communicate findings to a range of stakeholders. This was particularly valuable to me, as engaging key partners in data conversations is central to the success of my current project.
The training also outlined how to use the toolkit findings to identify high-impact interventions. As workshop participants, we all analyzed the same mock data set and identified an intervention based on both our findings and established evidence. The data highlighted how equity gaps persist from K-12 to postsecondary and into the labor market. While we came to similar conclusions from the data, this led to a range of proposed interventions, from more micro direct-service interventions to others targeted at the macro policy-level, spanning early childhood to K-12 to higher education. In thinking about how to identify a data-driven intervention, workshop presenter and Harvard Kennedy School public policy professor Dr. Chris Avery offered a useful framework, highlighting the importance of balancing early intervention with the scope and influence of your work, and the necessity of both individual-level and policy-level interventions to improve student outcomes.
I am eager to continue to use what I have learned from SDP’s diagnostic and training in my work at CSAC to measure the impact of state financial aid programs on students' postsecondary attainment and workforce outcomes. California’s P20W data system is opening up new data opportunities, allowing CSAC, which oversees $3 billion in grants for California students, to report on students' postsecondary outcomes for the first time. I am excited about the broader potential of this toolkit to facilitate meaningful analysis and inform policy changes that will allow all students to realize the benefits of higher education.