By Bill DeBaun, Senior Director of Data and Strategic Initiatives
Reading time: Four minutes
More than a decade ago, the National College Attainment Network (NCAN) released our Common Measures, a set of research-backed, member-developed college access and success indicators.
Members use the Common Measures, which are broken into categories like academic and financial aid indicators, to measure students’ progress and their programs’ performance. The Common Measures are, and were, a big stake in the ground for NCAN around
the idea that measurement is important and can help programs both improve their outcomes and scale their capacity.
It’s easy to think of the Common Measures as leading indicators of college access and attainment. But the Common Measures themselves, and whether students accomplish them, are also the result of students’ experiences, opportunities, and contexts.
In other words: what happens before the Common Measures?
For example, it’s true that whether a student completes a FAFSA is strongly associated with whether they enroll immediately following high school graduation. It’s also true that enrolling in Advanced Placement (AP) courses and earning a three or better on an AP exam is strongly associated with enrollment. But students’ learning and life contexts before they ever considered FAFSA completion or course-taking also affects whether they will or won’t do either of these things downstream.
One of the reasons indicators like those in the Common Measures are so prevalent is that they’re easily measured, and they’re logically connected to the outcomes of interest (postsecondary enrollment, persistence, completion). Despite this, NCAN and our
members know that students’ experiences, what they see, feel, and hear through their educational journey, matter. It’s just often hard to capture them.
That concept is a key focus in our current Postsecondary Pathways Project. One of the key activities of this investment is the,
“development and release of a student-centered support model that influences how all students engage with college and career readiness supports.” We wrote on this blog about a year ago:
“What NCAN proposes is to create and collate a student-centric model of postsecondary advising focused on what students see, feel, and experience in terms of support rather than focusing exclusively on the available inputs (e.g., staffing) that would
deliver those supports or outcome measures. The student support model we envision will describe the student’s experience in being advised, measure students’ outcomes, and then draw a correlative or causal association between the two.”
For the past year, NCAN has considered programs and organizations (both inside and outside of the NCAN membership), instruments, and approaches to connecting students’ experiences with their downstream activities and outcomes. We’ve conducted focus groups,
combed through research, and had conversations internally about what supportive systems and enabling conditions look like for students that would set them up for success in college and career. We’re also workshopping our own model of what students
should see, hear, and experience through the systems they’re involved with. It’s not perfect. What model is? But it’s a start, and we’re excited to share it and keep workshopping it with member feedback.
Below are five principles NCAN used to sketch out our supportive model of what states, districts, and schools should be doing:
Strive for equity in both experiences and student outcomes and uses multiple measures to track student progress.
Provide students with information and opportunities related to a wide breadth of college and career pathways, starting in middle school.
Believe in and support all students, not just those students historically on-track for matriculation to a college or university.
Deliver advising that is aligned with each student’s interests, aspirations, and aptitudes.
Collect, analyze, report, and share data critical to college and career pathways and use that data to drive their student services and supports.
Over the next year, we will connect the NCAN membership with organizations and experts leading this work around the country, share insights about best practices and available instruments, and examine research that supports the idea that students’ experiences
and their pathways are connected as surely as the Common Measures’ indicators are associated with enrollment and completion.
Interested in this work? We’re glad to hear it, and we want to hear from you! Using the form below, leave us any questions, comments, resources, or ideas you’d like us to consider. We’ll collate these and share them back out in a future post. We’re particularly interested inhow your program or organization measures or captures student experiences and feedback and uses this to improve or alter your programming or activities.
Thanks in advance for your feedback. We’re excited to continue learning alongside you!
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