Key takeaways
- The nation’s colleges and universities produce a wealth of data from research, administrative operations and other sources.
- A survey of higher ed administrators found that the institutions face major challenges in capturing that data and in making data from various sources work together.
- The study’s authors contend that universities have been slower than organizations in other economic sectors to create senior-level positions focused on data quality, strategy, governance and privacy matters.
Universities are literally awash in data. From administrative data offering information about students, faculty and staff, to research data on professors’ scholarly activities and even telemetric signals — the functional administrative data gathered remotely from wireless networks, security cameras and sensors in the course of daily operations — that data can be an invaluable resource.
But a new study by researchers at UCLA and the MIT Press, published Dec. 23 in the journal Science, finds that universities face significant challenges in capturing such data, and that they severely lag the private sector and government entities in using data to solve challenges and inform strategic planning.
“This new research shines a bright light on the ways in which universities are data rich and data poor — and sometimes intentionally data blind,” said Christine L. Borgman, distinguished research professor at the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies and one of the study’s authors. “They are struggling to capture and exploit the true value of their data resources and reluctant to initiate the conversations necessary to build consensus for data governance.”